Capex Tracker · Language Diff · Updated 2026-07-29

What Changed in the Wording

Companies change how they describe capex before they change how much they spend. A range that quietly becomes a floor, a "significantly" that turns into a "moderate", a timing hedge that appears next to a number nobody touched: none of it shows up in a chart, and all of it is in the filings. This page diffs the capex outlook passage word by word, quarter over quarter, and names what moved.

The numbers Methodology

Quarter Over Quarter

Microsoft · FY26 Q3 to FY26 Q4 · Earnings call · 2026-07-29

Mixed

Floor raised: floor moved from $40B to $50B
Intensity softened: direction eased from increase, higher to unchanged

Struck through was dropped, underlined is new

We expect CapEx spend to increase to will be over $40 $50 billion as we continue to bring more capacity online. For including the lease reclassification impact from the useful life update. Finance leases are included in capital expenditures while operating leases are not. Outside of this useful life impact, our calendar year 2026 we expect CapEx investment expectations remain unchanged. However, the shift from finance to invest roughly $190 billion in capital expenditures which includes operating leases adjusts our expectation to approximately $25 $175 billion. from the impact of higher component pricing.

The quarterly floor rises from over 40bn to over 50bn while the calendar-year figure falls from roughly 190bn to approximately 175bn. The company says in the same breath that its investment expectations are unchanged: the cut is an accounting reclassification, not a decision to spend less. A reader watching only the headline number sees a 15bn retreat that did not happen.

FY26 Q3 source FY26 Q4 source

Microsoft · FY26 Q2 to FY26 Q3 · Earnings call · 2026-04-29

Direction reversed

Direction reversed: direction flipped from decrease to increase, higher
Range added: a floor appeared where there was no figure
Timing hedge removed: dropped: variability, timing, timing of delivery, sequential basis

Struck through was dropped, underlined is new

Next, We expect capital expenditures CapEx spend to decrease on a sequential basis due increase to the normal variability over $40 billion as we continue to bring more capacity online. For calendar year 2026, we expect to invest roughly $190 billion in capital expenditures which includes approximately $25 billion from cloud infrastructure buildouts and the timing of delivery impact of finance leases. higher component pricing.

The quarter a number arrives and the hedges leave. A floor replaces the wordy variability language, and a calendar-year figure appears for the first time in the series.

FY26 Q2 source FY26 Q3 source

Microsoft · FY26 Q1 to FY26 Q2 · Earnings call · 2026-01-28

Direction reversed

Direction reversed: direction flipped from increase, increasing, growing, growth, accelerating, higher to decrease
Timing hedge added: added: sequential basis

Struck through was dropped, underlined is new

With accelerating demand and a growing RPO balance, we're increasing our spend on GPUs and CPUs. Therefore, total spend will increase sequentially, and Next, we now expect the FY26 growth rate capital expenditures to be higher than FY25. As decrease on a reminder, there can be quarterly spend sequential basis due to the normal variability from cloud infrastructure buildouts and the timing of delivery of finance leases.

One sentence, no figure, and the direction word flips. The variability hedge from the prior quarter survives verbatim, which is what makes the reversal stand out rather than read as a rewrite.

FY26 Q1 source FY26 Q2 source

How to Read It

Direction reversed is the loudest signal here: the same company, the same sentence structure, and "increase" replaced by "decrease". It gets its own verdict rather than being averaged away.

Range removed covers the case that matters most and reads as innocuous: a range becoming a floor deletes the ceiling. "$130 to $145 billion" and "over $130 billion" start at the same number and promise entirely different things.

Timing hedges (front-loaded, lumpy, variability, timing of delivery) are how a company keeps a number while reserving the right to miss it in any given quarter. Watch them arrive, and watch them leave: when Microsoft finally put a figure on the quarter, four hedges came out of the sentence at once.

Intensity and commitment are ranked, not merely compared, so "significantly" falling to "moderately" registers as a two-step softening and "we will" becoming "we could" registers as a loosened promise.

Every passage is stored verbatim and the validator rejects anything that is not. A paraphrase diffed against a quotation invents hedges that were never in the filing, which would make this page worse than nothing.

Not Yet Covered

Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Oracle, CoreWeave are tracked for capex figures but have no language passages on file yet. A passage only ships when its wording has been read from the source document rather than from coverage of it, so this list shrinks a filing at a time rather than all at once. The numbers for these companies are on the main tracker.

Use This Data

Part of the Hyperscaler Capex Tracker, licensed CC BY 4.0. Passages and diffs are in the dataset export at /data/capex.json.

Hyperscaler Capex Tracker, Regards of Wallstreet, retrieved 2026-08-06, https://www.regardsofwallstreet.com/data/capex/language

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