Spending & promises

Debt adds a timetable and a claim on assets

Financing a purchase is different from earning enough to repay it. The March CoreWeave case follows a staged loan into principal installments, reserve requirements and a limited parent guarantee. Its historical schedule is not a current cash bill.

Open the debt case and source-linked table →

Funding is another kind of money

The figures below compare company spending. They are not model-lab fundraising, future cloud purchases or contingent guarantees. The financing report follows Amazon and Anthropic, SoftBank’s OpenAI installments and NVIDIA’s infrastructure guarantee, keeping each type separate.

Follow payments, conditions and risk in three authored figures →

Cash paid in the same six months

These are whole-company cash flows for 1 January–30 June 2026, not AI-only accounts. “Property and equipment” means long-lived assets such as servers, buildings and other equipment. Outflows are shown as positive spending. Microsoft’s half-year is calculated from its June fiscal-year total minus the preceding July–December half.

The last line is a limited subtraction, not a universal definition of free cash flow. It excludes some cash uses, while operating leases and lease interest already affect cash from operations. A positive figure does not prove new AI projects pay back; a negative one does not establish insolvency.

Paid now, leased now, promised later

A lease can put equipment or a building on the balance sheet before the company pays most of the money. The initial asset entry and this period’s repayments answer different questions. Adding them together and calling the result “cash spent” counts the wrong things.

What the 2026 spending forecasts mean

Microsoft’s July earnings call lowered its calendar-2026 capital-spending outlook from $190 billion to $175 billion. Management attributed the change to extending the estimated accounting life of buildings and data centers from 15 to 25 years, effective in fiscal 2027. More prospective leases would then be classified as operating rather than finance leases. It said the underlying investment expectation was unchanged excluding that effect. July 29 call

That is not evidence of a $15 billion cash saving, a physical buildout cut or a 25-year GPU life. In the March quarter, management also explained why $31.9bn of reported capex, $4.7bn of finance leases and $30.9bn of cash equipment purchases did not add mechanically: receipt and payment timing differed. March-quarter timing explanation

Alphabet’s July outlook was $195–205bn, up from $180–190bn. Meta’s was $130–145bn, up from $125–145bn, with finance-lease principal included. These are management forecasts with different definitions, not an additive four-company AI bill. Alphabet outlook; Meta outlook

A newer Amazon outlook appeared in secondary search results, but its original supporting call text was not recovered. This page uses verified cash statements rather than calling that numerical outlook primary-verified.

Promises that extend beyond this year

A signed future lease is economically important even before the first payment. It is still not money already spent or a data center already serving customers. These disclosures have different scopes, start dates and terms; they are not added into a sector total.

Purchase commitments, lease payments, contingent maximums and spending already paid have different meanings. For example, Meta’s other non-cancellable commitments include third-party cloud and Reality Labs hardware, while some additional cloud exposure falls when other customers buy capacity. Those categories are not interchangeable “AI capex.” Meta commitment conditions

Money does not tell us how much equipment is earning

Alphabet’s $122.814bn not-yet-in-service assets and Meta’s $80.345bn construction balance at June 30 are stocks of unfinished work. They cannot be added to cash spending or converted into paid AI use. Alphabet; Meta

Read the capacity evidence, including the independent grid check →

Exact data and boundaries

Inspect the complete definitions, numbers and source URLs (JSON) · Open the matched cash table (CSV). These are direct files; use the browser’s save function to keep a copy. Unknown values are null or empty, never zero.

Microsoft’s full-year lease disclosures are kept outside the half-year comparison. Meta’s missing new finance-lease addition flow is unknown, not zero. The source data also distinguish current cash, subsequent events, contingent amounts and purchase obligations.

Debt has more than one kind of backing

A facility ceiling is not principal already borrowed. A parent guarantee is not collateral. The updated CoreWeave case compares two dated parent promises, then keeps June’s dollar and euro note issues separate. It does not add them to an old debt balance.

Compare the later terms and inspect their sources →