Disclosure, as with our earlier piece on Amazon's quarter: the Anthropic stake that dominates Amazon's headline profit is a stake in the company whose models this newsroom uses in drafting. The numbers below are the companies' own.
Add the three biggest AI builders' equipment purchases for the thirteen weeks from April through June. Amazon: $54.2 billion. Microsoft: $35.8 billion in cash purchases of property and equipment, plus another $5.6 billion in finance leases. Meta: $31.08 billion including finance-lease principal. [1][2][3]
On the cash-purchase basis the three companies spent about $121 billion in one quarter. The bases are not perfectly aligned, which is why we name them: Meta's figure folds in lease principal, Microsoft's headline number does not.
The number that changes the story is not the spending. It is what the spending has done to Amazon's cash.
From Amazon's own release: "Free cash flow decreased to an outflow of $7.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, driven primarily by a year-over-year increase of $66.1 billion in purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives." [1]
Negative. Amazon generated $161.4 billion in operating cash over those twelve months, up 33 percent, and still ended the period $7.6 billion short after equipment. The company is not in trouble; a firm of that size can fund a build-out for years. What it is, unambiguously and by its own accounting, is spending faster than it earns cash.
Meta's version is less dramatic and points the same way. Operating cash flow of $31.86 billion, capital expenditure of $31.08 billion, free cash flow of $784 million. [3] Ninety-eight cents of every operating dollar went back into the ground. The company also narrowed its 2026 capital-spending guidance to $130 to $145 billion, which sounds like a tightening and is not: the floor rose by $5 billion. The minimum went up.
Microsoft is the outlier, and the reason is its order book. Q4 revenue of $90.0 billion, up 18 percent; net income $35.8 billion, up 31 percent; Azure up 43 percent; free cash flow still positive at $19.6 billion after $35.8 billion of equipment. [2] The figure that matters most is the commercial remaining performance obligation: $678 billion, up 84 percent. [2] That is contracted future revenue. It is the strongest available evidence that somebody actually intends to buy what all this concrete and silicon will produce.
The honest read has two halves. The demand signal is real and enormous, and Microsoft's book is the proof. The financing strain is also real, visible in Amazon's negative free cash flow and Meta's 98-cent reinvestment rate, and it is new. A year ago these were the most reliably cash-generative businesses on earth.
One comparison for scale, and then we will leave it alone: $121 billion in a quarter is more than the annual federal budget for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation combined. Three companies, thirteen weeks.
What we will not print is the number circulating for Microsoft's calendar-2026 capital plan, reportedly around $175 billion under a revised datacenter accounting treatment. It appears in a summary of an SEC filing we could not fetch, and the company's own release says nothing about it. When we can read the filing, we will report it.
