How Much Do AI Companies Actually Spend on Compute?
Reading the capex line in four hyperscaler filings, and what it does and does not tell us.
The Research Note1 min read
Every quarter the largest technology companies report a capital expenditure figure, and every quarter it is read as an AI number. It is not, quite. This note works through what the filings actually say.
The question is narrower than it sounds. Nobody discloses a compute line item. What they disclose is property, plant and equipment, inside which sits an unlabelled mixture of data centre shells, land, networking gear, and accelerators.
What the filings actually disclose
Capital expenditure is reported in aggregate. Separating the accelerator share from the building it sits in requires assumptions, and those assumptions are where most published estimates quietly differ from one another.
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