Methodology

One row per company per fiscal quarter, carrying up to three figures, because these companies do not all mean the same thing by the word capex:

• Cash capex. The cash flow statement line, tagged in SEC XBRL as PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment. Cash actually paid for property and equipment in the period. Amazon reports a variant net of proceeds from sales and incentives, which is labeled separately.
• Finance leases. Data center capacity taken on under a lease rather than bought. It never touches the cash capex line, and for Microsoft it has run to several billion dollars in a single quarter. Where a company discloses it, this column carries it.
• The company-stated total. What management said on the call, on its own basis. For Microsoft, Amazon and Meta that basis includes finance leases, which is exactly why it is the number they guide to and the number worth tracking.

The headline figure for each row sits on the basis that company guides to, and the page labels which basis that is. Comparing a company that guides on cash capex against one that guides including finance leases, without saying so, is the single most common error in published capex comparisons.

Fiscal years end in three different months across this group, so quarters are keyed by the calendar quarter they end in. Microsoft's FY26 Q4 (April to June) and Oracle's FY26 Q4 (March to May) both sit in Q2 2026. It is the only alignment that lets the group be added up without pretending everyone runs on a calendar year.

SEC cash flow concepts are filed year to date. A company's third-quarter 10-Q reports nine months of capex, not three. Any tracker that reads those facts straight out of XBRL publishes a series that silently mixes three-month and nine-month numbers.

The rules here, in order:

1. A fact that already covers a single quarter is used as reported.
2. Otherwise the quarter is the difference between two cumulative facts that share a start date: nine months less six months gives the third quarter, and the full year less nine months gives the fourth.
3. Where the same period appears in more than one filing, the most recently filed value wins, so restatements are picked up rather than ignored.
4. Every row records which of these produced it, so a subtracted quarter is never presented as a reported one.

The check that matters: the four quarters of a fiscal year must sum to the full-year figure in the filing. Microsoft's FY26 quarters of 19,394, 29,876, 30,876 and 35,802 million sum to the 115,948 million reported for the year, which is what makes the derived June quarter trustworthy. That reconciliation runs as a test on every build.

Where a company gives both a stated total and the components, the tracker shows the difference rather than hiding it. It is usually a timing difference: the stated figure is accrual spending, recognised when capacity is committed, while the cash line is money that actually left the building. A quarter with heavy accruals shows a positive gap and the following quarter, when the invoices are paid, shows a negative one.

Microsoft's March 2026 quarter is the clean example: management described capex of 31.9bn, down sequentially on the timing of finance lease deliveries, while cash paid for property and equipment rose to 30.9bn. Both are true. Publishing only one of them, without the label, is how a reader ends up believing spending fell when the cash went up.

Every guide is stored with the date it was given, the basis it was given on, the wording management used, and what it superseded. Scoring waits for the period to close:

• A range guide is met when the actual lands between its bounds.
• A floor ("over $40 billion") is met at or above the floor. A ceiling is met at or below it.
• An approximate guide ("roughly $190 billion") gets 5% of room in either direction, which is about the precision management speaks with. A hard point guide gets 2%.
• An unfinished year is labeled in progress, with the number of quarters counted shown, rather than being scored as a miss on partial data.
• Where a company reported a full-year total but the individual quarters are not all on file, the guide is scored against that company-reported total and the page says so.

Every row says where its number came from, because that is not always the same place:

• XBRL. Pulled straight from the SEC company-concept API by the ingest script, with the concept, accession number and filing date recorded.
• Filing. Read directly from the company's own release, statement or investor page during data entry.
• Reported. Carried by two or more sources with at least one primary document or tier-1 outlet among them, where the primary document itself could not be opened. These rows are counted in the totals but the coverage note on every tile says how much of the number is confirmed.

Aggregators never establish a figure on their own. Every row needs at least one primary or tier-1 source, and rows marked reported need two sources minimum. The validator enforces both.

Companies change how they describe capex before they change how much they spend, so the tracker also stores the capex outlook passage itself and diffs it quarter over quarter at /data/capex/language. It classifies direction reversals, ranges that became floors, intensity and commitment shifts, and timing hedges arriving or leaving.

One rule holds that page up: a passage enters only if the text is verbatim, read from the source document, and the validator rejects anything else. Diffing a paraphrase against a quotation manufactures hedges nobody filed. It is also why quoted text is exempt from this site's no-em-dash rule: editing a quotation to fit a style guide is falsifying it.

• It is not exhaustive. A quarter appears when it has been verified, not when it was reported, so a company may have fewer quarters on file than it has published.
• It does not split capex by asset type. Servers against shells against networking is disclosed inconsistently and mostly in round percentages on calls, which is commentary rather than data.
• It does not net out customer prepayments except where a company guides that way, in which case the basis is labeled. Oracle's fiscal 2027 guide is a net figure and is excluded from the calendar-year group total for that reason.
• It does not forecast. Guides are recorded as statements companies made, with dates, not as this site's estimates.

Figures are corrected in place with a revision entry recording what the row used to say and why it changed, and those entries render on each company page. The ingest script reconciles hand-entered rows against XBRL on every run and reports disagreements rather than overwriting quietly; when it does correct a value, it writes the revision entry itself. Nothing is deleted to make the dataset look cleaner than its history.

Found an error or a missing quarter? The contact form reaches us, and corrections with a primary source get applied fast.

Licensed CC BY 4.0: copy it, chart it, build on it, including commercially, with attribution and a link.

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

Machine-readable at /data/capex.json and /data/capex.csv, both generated from the same files the pages render from.