AI Capex Tracker 2026: Every Major AI Infrastructure Spending Commitment, Dated and Primary-Sourced

AI Capex Tracker 2026

Last updated: September 12, 2026, 09:00 UTC — Update frequency: Within 48 hours of any qualifying disclosure; a full sweep of all tracked filers within 72 hours of each earnings quarter closing; monthly bilan on the first Tuesday. Entries live: 18 · Entries carrying an open verification flag: 6 — Amazon’s 2026 guidance, TSMC’s 2026 capital budget, Oracle’s FY2027 net cash outlay (all flagged inline) | Maintained by: Axis Intelligence Research & Sarah Mitchell — CC BY 4.0

Quick Answer

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft together spent $170.1 billion on capital expenditures in the quarter ended June 30, 2026 — equal to 99.0% of the $171.7 billion those four generated in operating cash flow over the same three months. Axis Intelligence Research calls that ratio the Capex Absorption Ratio™. Its inaugural reading is 99.0%.

Key Findings

1. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the four largest US hyperscalers spent 99.0% of their combined second-quarter 2026 operating cash flow on capital expenditures, based on figures in each company’s own quarterly release.
2. Alphabet reported capital expenditures of $44.9 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, and free cash flow of negative $5.9 billion — the first negative quarter in its published free cash flow reconciliation.
3. Amazon’s trailing-twelve-month purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds, reached $169.0 billion as of June 30, 2026, a 64% increase year over year.
4. Meta’s second-quarter 2026 capital expenditures including finance lease principal were $31.08 billion, against $31.86 billion of operating cash flow, leaving $784 million of free cash flow.
5. CoreWeave raised its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $35-39 billion on August 11, 2026, from the $31-35 billion range set in May.

How Much Are Hyperscalers Guiding to Spend on AI Capex in 2026?

Four companies have issued and repeatedly revised full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance. The revisions are the story: three of the four have raised their number twice since January, and the fourth lowered its headline figure without lowering its spending.

Company	First 2026 guidance	Latest 2026 guidance	Midpoint change	What the number covers	Source
Alphabet	$175–185B (Feb 4, 2026)	$195–205B (Jul 22, 2026)	+11.1%	Capital expenditures, calendar year	Q4 2025 release; Q2 2026 earnings call
Meta	$115–135B (Jan 28, 2026)	$130–145B (Jul 29, 2026)	+10.0%	Capex incl. finance lease principal	Meta Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 releases
Amazon	~$200B (Feb 2026) ⚑	~$220B (Jul 30, 2026) ⚑	+10.0%	Cash capital expenditures	Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 earnings calls
Microsoft	Not restated in the July 29 transcript ⚑	~$175B (Jul 29, 2026)	Not computable	Capex incl. finance leases, calendar year	Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings call

⚑ = figure sourced from an earnings call rather than a filed document; see the verification flags in the entry log below.

Alphabet’s intermediate step — $180–190 billion, disclosed at its first-quarter 2026 report — is confirmed in the free writing prospectus Alphabet filed with the SEC on June 1, 2026. Meta’s intermediate range of $125–145 billion is confirmed inside the July 29 release itself, which describes the new range as a narrowing of that prior outlook.

Axis Intelligence Research does not publish a single merged “Big Four 2026 capex” figure, and this is deliberate. The four numbers above are built on three different definitions: Alphabet and Amazon report cash purchases of property and equipment, Meta and Microsoft fold finance leases in, and Microsoft’s is a calendar-year figure carved out of a June fiscal year. Adding them produces $732.5 billion at the midpoints, a number now circulating widely — but it is an estimate assembled from incompatible bases, one of which came from a conference call and one of which fell by roughly $15 billion for an accounting reason rather than a spending one. We publish the components and let the reader do the arithmetic knowingly.

That last point deserves its own sentence, because a lot of coverage got it backwards in the last week of July. Microsoft’s calendar-2026 capex line came down. Microsoft’s calendar-2026 spending did not.

What Is the Axis Capex Absorption Ratio™ (CAR™)?

Definition. CAR™ measures how much of a company’s operating cash flow, in a given quarter, is consumed by capital expenditure.

CAR™ = capital expenditures ÷ net cash provided by operating activities
       (same fiscal quarter, same company, each on that company's own free-cash-flow basis)

Cohort CAR™ = Σ capital expenditures ÷ Σ operating cash flow

Methodology version: v1.0 · Cohort v1.0: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft · Reading as of: quarter ended June 30, 2026

Company	Capex ($M)	Operating cash flow ($M)	CAR™	Capex basis used
Alphabet	44,924	39,069	115.0%	Purchases of property and equipment
Amazon	53,076	45,387	116.9%	Purchases of P&E net of proceeds and incentives
Meta	31,078	31,862	97.5%	Purchases of P&E + finance lease principal
Microsoft	41,000	55,400	74.0%	Capital expenditures incl. finance leases
Cohort	170,078	171,718	99.0%	—

Simple mean of the four company readings: 100.9%. The cohort reading of 99.0% is the weighted figure and is the one Axis Intelligence Research publishes as the headline.

Two supplementary readings, outside the cohort. Adding a member to cohort v1.0 would require a version bump and a re-baseline, so these are published alongside the cohort rather than inside it. For the same quarter, TSMC’s CAR™ is 63.3% (NT$496.00bn capex ÷ NT$783.36bn operating cash flow) and CoreWeave’s is 945.8% ($6,422M cash purchases of property and equipment ÷ $679M operating cash flow). The spread between those two numbers is the whole structure of this market in one line: the company that makes the chips still funds its buildout out of its own cash flow nine times over, while the company that rents the chips out funds its buildout almost entirely from the debt market.

This is the baseline reading. CAR™ is computed here for the first time; there is no prior series, and no historical values have been backfilled. Comparisons to earlier quarters will appear only once those quarters have been computed from the same primary filings under the same v1.0 method.

Reproduce it. Every input above sits in a cash flow statement inside a document linked in the entry log. Alphabet’s and Amazon’s figures come straight off the investing-activities line; Meta’s is the sum of its purchases of property and equipment ($30,116M) and principal payments on finance leases ($962M), matching the $31.08 billion its own release reports; Microsoft’s two components are stated in the CFO’s prepared remarks.

What it means. A CAR™ near 100 means the buildout has stopped being self-funding at the margin. Every additional dollar of servers, land, or transformers now competes with dividends, buybacks, and the balance sheet rather than coming out of the cash the business threw off that quarter. The corroboration is in the financing lines, not in the rhetoric: Alphabet took $49.6 billion of net equity proceeds in June and issued $20.3 billion of senior notes in the quarter, taking long-term debt from $46.5 billion at year-end to $98.2 billion; Meta issued $24.9 billion of long-term debt in the same three months. Alphabet also paused buybacks.

What would reverse it. Two things, in order of likelihood: operating cash flow catching up (Amazon’s grew 33% on a trailing basis while capex grew 64% — the gap is closing from the wrong side), or a deliberate slowdown in short-lived asset purchases. Microsoft’s CFO made the second lever explicit, describing GPU and CPU purchases as the largest, most deferrable component of the spend. Watch that line before you watch the announcements.

Stated limitations. Four of them, plainly. CAR™ compares a cash-flow ratio across companies that define capex slightly differently, and the table above names each basis rather than harmonizing them. It is a quarterly snapshot, so seasonality and equipment delivery timing move it. It says nothing about return on the spending — a company with a CAR™ of 130% earning a good return is healthier than one at 60% earning nothing. And it excludes off-balance-sheet capacity: operating leases, customer-prepaid hardware (Oracle’s disclosed $75 billion), and third-party capacity rented rather than built all deliver compute without appearing in capex.

AI Capex Tracker: All Logged Entries

Reverse chronological. Every entry carries the primary document it was verified against and the date Axis retrieved it.

September 10, 2026 — Oracle’s quarterly capex hits $28.5 billion, and its 10-Q discloses $288 billion of lease commitments that are on nobody’s balance sheet

Severity: Tier 1 (>=$100B) · Entity: Oracle Corporation · Type: Reported actual

Oracle spent $28.50 billion on property, plant and equipment in the quarter ended August 31, 2026, against $8.50 billion a year earlier — a 235.2% increase, computed by Axis from the two cash flow statements. Operating cash flow was $23.10 billion, giving free cash flow of negative $5.40 billion and a CAR™ of 123.4%. Property, plant and equipment rose to $127.85 billion from $99.96 billion in three months, with construction in progress alone at $48.55 billion. Remaining performance obligations reached $664 billion.

The number that matters is in the notes, not the headline. Oracle discloses $288 billion of additional lease commitments, substantially all data center arrangements, expected to commence between the second quarter of fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2029 on terms of fifteen to nineteen years — and explicitly not reflected on the balance sheet or in the lease maturities table. That is 3.1 times Oracle’s entire stated fiscal 2027 capital expenditure guidance, sitting outside every capex figure this tracker or anyone else aggregates.

Set that beside the two other structures already logged here — Meta’s $14 billion El Paso venture with BlackRock at 80%, and the PORTS-Pike campus where SB Energy owns the asset and OpenAI holds a 20-year lease — and the pattern stops being three anecdotes. The industry is moving its buildout into instruments that capex does not measure. A tracker that only counted capital expenditure would report a sector decelerating while the concrete kept pouring. This is why the page carries a “What Counts as AI Capex?” section, and why that section now leads with leases.

The financing side is equally direct. Oracle fully drew its $20 billion at-the-market equity programme in a single quarter, issuing 141 million shares for $19.91 billion net. Senior notes and other long-term borrowings stand at $125.0 billion carrying value against an estimated fair value of $105.7 billion. Customer prepayments carrying a significant financing component brought in $11.36 billion, none a year earlier — the customers are funding the datacenters, and Oracle is booking the financing cost. Primary source: Oracle Corporation, Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended August 31, 2026, filed September 10, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-09-12

August 26, 2026 — NVIDIA’s own capex is $2.7 billion, or 8.9x less of its cash flow than its customers spend

Severity: Tier 1 (>=$100B, on the financing platform) · Entity: NVIDIA Corporation · Type: Reported actual + financing platform

NVIDIA reported revenue of $96.22 billion for the quarter ended July 26, 2026, with Data Center revenue of $89.0 billion, up 117% year over year. Purchases related to property, equipment and intangible assets were $2.68 billion against operating cash flow of $24.08 billion, and free cash flow was $21.34 billion.

Put NVIDIA’s CAR™ next to the cohort’s and the quarter resolves into one sentence. NVIDIA absorbs 11.1% of its operating cash flow in capital expenditure. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft together absorb 99.0% — 8.9 times more. The buildout’s economics are not symmetrical and were never meant to be: the four buyers are converting cash flow into depreciating assets, and the seller is converting the same buildout into free cash flow at a 75.0% gross margin. Anyone modelling this sector as a single pool of “AI capex” is netting a debtor against a creditor.

Two balance-sheet lines deserve equal attention, because NVIDIA is no longer only selling into this cycle. Long-term debt rose to $32.37 billion from $7.47 billion at the January year-end, with $24.90 billion of net debt proceeds raised in the quarter. Non-marketable securities rose to $51.16 billion from $22.25 billion, with $42.40 billion of equity securities purchased in the first half. The company is helping finance its own demand.

NVIDIA also announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish independent compute financing platforms intended to mobilise over $500 billion of third-party capital over time. That figure is logged with a subject_to_definitive_agreements flag and excluded from every aggregate on this page, because NVIDIA’s own release says definitive agreements are not yet in place. Intent at half a trillion dollars is still intent. Primary source: NVIDIA Corporation, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, August 26, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-09-02

August 17, 2026 — Axe Compute contracts 55 MW with Duos Technologies for over $500 million

Severity: Tier 4 (<$5B) · Entity: Axe Compute Inc. · Type: Capacity commitment

Axe Compute filed an 8-K disclosing agreements with Duos Technologies Group for 55 MW of new AI data center capacity across multiple US locations, representing over $500 million in expected aggregate payments. The same filing discloses that the two parties have executed nonbinding term sheets for minority equity investments under which Axe Compute would hold 49% of the equity in the project entities.

Two figures, two different treatments. The 55 MW and the $500 million come from executed agreements and are logged. The 49% equity stake comes from a nonbinding term sheet, which the published criteria exclude, and it is recorded in the dataset as context with no dollar value attached. A term sheet is an intention; this tracker counts commitments. Primary source: Axe Compute Inc., Form 8-K, Item 8.01, filed August 17, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-08-19

August 11, 2026 — CoreWeave lifts 2026 capex to $35–39 billion, and its two capex numbers don’t match each other

Severity: Tier 2 ($25–99.9B) · Entity: CoreWeave, Inc. · Type: Guidance raise + reported actual

CoreWeave raised full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $35–39 billion from the $31–35 billion set in May, a 12.1% increase at the midpoint, and told analysts second-quarter capex was $9.4 billion, slightly above the top of its guided range. Revenue backlog closed the quarter at approximately $104 billion, active power reached 1.5 GW after adding nearly 500 MW, and contracted power stands at roughly 3.7 GW.

Here is the part worth reading twice. CoreWeave’s own filed cash flow statement shows purchases of property and equipment, including capitalised internal-use software, of $6,422 million for the quarter — $2,978 million below the $9.4 billion the company describes as capex. The difference is timing and financing structure, not a discrepancy, but it means the $9.4 billion and Alphabet’s $44.9 billion are not the same kind of number, and this tracker records both figures rather than choosing one. The same gap appears across the half: $14,117 million of cash purchases against the $16.1 billion of capex management cited.

The funding tells the rest of it. Operating cash flow was $679 million for the quarter. Financing brought in $13,457 million of new debt proceeds and $997 million of private-placement equity. Interest expense reached $640 million in three months, against a $626 million net loss — the interest line alone is now larger than the loss it helps create. Property and equipment on the balance sheet grew from $30.6 billion at year-end to $46.7 billion, and operating lease right-of-use assets doubled to $16.6 billion. Primary source: CoreWeave, Inc., CoreWeave Reports Strong Second Quarter 2026 Results (Exhibit 99.1), August 11, 2026 — sec.gov; guidance from the Q2 2026 earnings call transcript at investors.coreweave.com · Retrieved 2026-08-17

August 11, 2026 — TSMC’s board approves $29.44 billion of capital appropriations

Severity: Tier 2 ($25–99.9B) · Entity: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company · Type: Supplier capital authorisation

TSMC’s board approved capital appropriations of approximately US$29,442.50 million, stating the purposes as installation and upgrade of advanced technology capacity, installation and upgrade of advanced packaging and mature or specialty capacity, and fab construction with facility systems. The same meeting approved the second-quarter financial statements and a joint venture with Sony Semiconductor Solutions for next-generation image sensors, with a share subscription capped at ¥282 billion.

A board appropriation is not the same object as an annual capex budget, and conflating them is a common error. The appropriation is an authorisation to commit; the $60–64 billion budget is a spending forecast for the calendar year. This tracker logs them as separate rows with separate metrics. Primary source: TSMC, TSMC Board of Directors Meeting Resolutions, August 11, 2026 — pr.tsmc.com · Retrieved 2026-08-17

August 10, 2026 — Riot Platforms signs a 20-year, 191 MW lease worth $9.1 billion with an unnamed frontier AI lab

Severity: Tier 3 ($5–24.9B) · Entity: Riot Platforms, Inc. · Type: Capacity commitment (counterparty side)

Riot disclosed a Data Center Lease and Services Agreement for 191 MW of critical IT capacity at its Rockdale campus, running 20 years through June 2048 and expected to generate approximately $9.1 billion in initial contract revenue, rising to roughly $16.1 billion if both five-year extension options are exercised. Combined with an earlier AMD lease, Riot has now contracted 241 MW representing approximately $9.8 billion of long-term revenue. Quarterly revenue was $174.2 million, of which $23.2 million came from the data center segment.

Riot names the tenant only as “one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs.” Several outlets have identified the counterparty; none of those identifications comes from a document either party filed or published, so this tracker does not name it. The lease is logged; the tenant field stays empty until a filing fills it. That is the difference between a tracker and a news aggregator. Primary source: Riot Platforms, Inc., Riot Platforms Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results and Strategic Highlights (Exhibit 99.1), August 10, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-08-17

August 4, 2026 — Bitdeer signs a $4.7 billion, 16-year lease for 121 IT MW in Norway

Severity: Tier 4 (<$5B) · Entity: Bitdeer Technologies Group · Type: Capacity commitment (counterparty side)

Bitdeer disclosed approximately $4.7 billion in contracted revenue over an initial 16-year base term for its Tydal, Norway campus, with a one-time eight-year extension option that would take total contract value to $8.0 billion. The tenant is a subsidiary of Volta; the full 121 IT MW will be configured to run NVIDIA GPUs for an end customer Bitdeer describes only as a leading AI lab. A credit backstop of approximately $1.3 billion is anticipated via letters of credit arranged by affiliates of J.P. Morgan and another institution.

Same pattern as the Riot entry, same treatment: the end customer is not named in the filing and is not named here. Primary source: Bitdeer Technologies Group, Form 6-K Exhibit 99.1, August 4, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-08-17

July 30, 2026 — Amazon lifts 2026 cash capex to about $220 billion after a $53.1 billion quarter

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Amazon.com, Inc. · Type: Guidance raise + reported actual

Amazon spent $54.21 billion on property and equipment in the second quarter and received $1.13 billion back in sales proceeds and incentives, a net $53.08 billion. On a trailing-twelve-month basis, net purchases hit $169.0 billion, up 64% year over year, while operating cash flow rose 33% to $161.4 billion. The result is the number that will be quoted for the rest of the year: trailing free cash flow of negative $7.6 billion, against a positive $18.2 billion a year earlier. Amazon says the $66.1 billion year-over-year increase in property and equipment purchases “primarily reflects investments in artificial intelligence.” AWS grew 37% to $42.2 billion with segment operating income of $16.6 billion — the return case and the spending case landing in the same paragraph, which is roughly where this whole sector now lives. On the earnings call, management raised full-year 2026 cash capital expenditure guidance to approximately $220 billion from approximately $200 billion, citing higher memory costs. ⚑ pending_primary: the $220 billion and the prior $200 billion figures were stated on the call, not in the filed release. Resolution path: Amazon’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (SEC EDGAR, CIK 0001018724) and the call replay at amazon.com/ir. Primary source: Amazon.com, Inc., Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Results, July 30, 2026 — ir.aboutamazon.com · Retrieved 2026-08-01

July 29, 2026 — Microsoft closes FY26 with a $41 billion quarter; an accounting change trims the calendar-2026 line to about $175 billion

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Microsoft Corporation · Type: Guidance revision (accounting-driven) + reported actual

Capital expenditures including finance leases were $41 billion in the June quarter, with roughly two thirds going to short-lived assets — CPUs and GPUs. Finance leases accounted for $5.6 billion and cash paid for property and equipment was $35.8 billion. Operating cash flow was $55.4 billion and free cash flow $19.6 billion. Then the part that moved the headline number. Effective at the start of fiscal 2027, Microsoft extends the estimated useful life of datacenters and office buildings from 15 to 25 years, and expects more future datacenter leases to be classified as operating rather than finance leases. Finance leases sit inside capex; operating leases do not. Microsoft’s CFO said calendar-2026 investment expectations are otherwise unchanged, and that the reclassification alone moves the expected figure to approximately $175 billion. Guidance for the September quarter is above $50 billion, and fiscal 2027 capex is expected to grow year over year. The physical build tells the same story the accounting obscures: 31 new datacenters added in the quarter, 88 across the fiscal year, roughly a gigawatt of capacity added in three months, and a stated plan to roughly double total capacity within two years. Commercial remaining performance obligations reached $678 billion, up 84%. ⚑ pending_primary: Microsoft’s previous calendar-2026 capex expectation was not restated in the July 29 transcript, so the widely cited ~$190 billion prior figure is not verified here and does not appear in our dataset. Resolution path: the FY26 Q3 earnings call transcript and outlook slides at microsoft.com/investor. Primary source: Microsoft Corporation, FY26 Q4 Earnings Conference Call transcript, July 29, 2026 — microsoft.com/investor · Retrieved 2026-08-01

July 29, 2026 — Meta narrows 2026 capex to $130–145 billion; a $31.1 billion quarter leaves $784 million of free cash flow

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Meta Platforms, Inc. · Type: Guidance revision + reported actual

Meta’s second-quarter capital expenditures including finance lease principal were $31.08 billion, against $17.01 billion in the same quarter of 2025 — an increase of 82.7% computed by Axis from the two cash flow statements. Operating cash flow of $31.86 billion covered it with $784 million to spare, down from $8.55 billion of free cash flow a year earlier. The company narrowed full-year guidance to $130–145 billion from $125–145 billion, raised the floor of its total expense outlook to $165–169 billion to absorb $2.40 billion of legal charges, and issued $24.91 billion of long-term debt during the quarter. A narrowed range that lifts the floor by $5 billion and holds the ceiling is not a hedge. It is a company telling you the low scenario is off the table. Primary source: Meta Platforms, Inc., Meta Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results (Exhibit 99.1), July 29, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-08-01

July 28, 2026 — Meta moves a $14 billion campus off its own balance sheet with BlackRock

Severity: Tier 3 ($5–24.9B) · Entity: Meta Platforms, Inc. · Type: Financing structure for AI infrastructure · (backfilled entry — see the update log)

Meta and BlackRock announced a venture to develop and own a 1 GW data center campus in El Paso, Texas. BlackRock funds own 80% and Meta 20%. The parties committed to fund their pro rata share of approximately $14 billion in total development costs; at financial close Meta contributes land and construction-in-progress valued at approximately $2.3 billion, BlackRock contributes approximately $4.9 billion in cash, and Meta receives a one-time distribution of approximately $1 billion to align the stakes. A portion of BlackRock’s investment is funded from a $12.5 billion debt financing. Meta leases the entire campus back on a four-year initial term with four extension options across a potential 20-year term, and provides residual value guarantees with an aggregate threshold of approximately $13 billion that decreases over time. Meta states the El Paso site represents an investment of over $10 billion from Meta and expects capacity online in 2028.

This is the single most important entry in the tracker for anyone modelling hyperscaler capex, and it is the one most likely to be missed, because almost none of it lands in Meta’s capital expenditure line. A campus Meta designed, manages, occupies exclusively, and guarantees the residual value of is 80% owned by someone else and funded largely by debt Meta did not issue. The lease payments will run through operating expense. Whatever the correct accounting, a reader who tracks only the $130–145 billion guidance figure will undercount the compute Meta is bringing online — which is precisely why this tracker logs structures, not just guidance numbers. Primary source: Meta Platforms, Inc., Meta Announces New Strategic Venture with BlackRock to Develop Data Center in El Paso, July 28, 2026 — investor.atmeta.com · Retrieved 2026-08-17

July 22, 2026 — Alphabet raises 2026 capex to $195–205 billion and posts its first negative free cash flow quarter

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Alphabet Inc. · Type: Guidance raise + reported actual

Purchases of property and equipment were $44.92 billion in the quarter, against $22.45 billion a year earlier — precisely double, by Axis calculation. Operating cash flow was $39.07 billion, producing free cash flow of negative $5.86 billion in Alphabet’s own reconciliation. First-half capex stands at $80.60 billion and the trailing twelve months at $132.40 billion. Google Cloud revenue grew 82% to $24.77 billion. On the call, the CFO raised full-year guidance to $195–205 billion from $180–190 billion, attributing the increase to accelerated delivery of capacity, and described the split as roughly 60% servers and 40% datacenters and networking equipment. Applied to the quarter’s $44.9 billion, that split implies about $27 billion of server and accelerator procurement in three months from one buyer. Primary source: Alphabet Inc., Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, July 22, 2026 — abc.xyz/investor; guidance from the Q2 2026 earnings call transcript at abc.xyz · Retrieved 2026-08-01

July 16, 2026 — TSMC raises its 2026 capital budget to $60–64 billion and adds $100 billion in Arizona

Severity: Tier 2 ($25–99.9B) · Entity: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company · Type: Supplier capital budget raise

TSMC lifted its full-year 2026 capital budget to a range of $60–64 billion from the $52–56 billion set earlier in the year, citing structural demand including agentic AI workloads, and announced an additional $100 billion of investment in Arizona.

Second-quarter capital expenditures were NT$496.00 billion against NT$783.36 billion of cash from operating activities, leaving free cash flow of NT$287.36 billion — figures now confirmed from the earnings presentation TSMC furnished to the SEC on Form 6-K. At the company’s stated average exchange rate of 31.60 NT dollars to the US dollar, quarterly capex works out to roughly $15.7 billion. TSMC belongs in a capex tracker because foundry capital is the upstream constraint on everything below it: the hyperscaler guidance raises above are only deliverable if this line moves first.

⚑ pending_primary (narrowed since the last update): the quarterly capex and cash flow figures are now verified against a filed document and the flag no longer covers them. What remains unverified is the $60–64 billion annual capital budget and the $52–56 billion prior range, both delivered at the July 16 earnings conference and absent from the filed presentation, which discloses only the revenue growth outlook. Resolution path: TSMC’s 2026 Form 20-F, or a subsequent quarterly presentation restating the budget. Primary source: TSMC, 2026 Second Quarter Earnings Conference presentation, furnished on Form 6-K, July 16, 2026 — sec.gov · Retrieved 2026-08-17

June 10, 2026 — Oracle’s fiscal 2026 capex reaches $55.7 billion and free cash flow falls to negative $23.7 billion

Severity: Tier 2 ($25–99.9B) · Entity: Oracle Corporation · Type: Reported actual + financing disclosure

Oracle’s release states fiscal 2026 operating cash flow of $32.0 billion, up 54%, and free cash flow of negative $23.7 billion. Axis derives capital expenditure of $55.7 billion from those two figures. Remaining performance obligations closed the year at $638 billion, up 363% and up $85 billion sequentially from $553 billion, driven by large AI contracts. The disclosure that matters most for capex modelling is the one nobody put in a headline: prepaid and customer-supplied hardware inside those AI contracts now totals $75 billion, which Oracle says substantially reduces the capital it must raise itself. Oracle raised $43 billion of debt and $5 billion of equity in fiscal 2026 and expects roughly $40 billion more in fiscal 2027, including a previously announced $20 billion at-the-market equity issuance, while saying it does not expect to issue additional debt in calendar 2026. ⚑ pending_primary: Oracle’s fiscal 2027 net cash outlay guidance of approximately $70 billion was given on the earnings call and does not appear in the release. Resolution path: Q4 FY26 earnings slides and call replay at investor.oracle.com; Form 10-K for FY2026. Primary source: Oracle Corporation, Oracle Announces Record Q4 and FY 2026 Results, June 10, 2026 — oracle.com · Retrieved 2026-08-01

June 3, 2026 — Alphabet prices an upsized $84.75 billion equity raise earmarked for AI compute

Severity: Tier 2 ($25–99.9B) · Entity: Alphabet Inc. · Type: Financing earmarked for AI infrastructure

Alphabet announced proposed equity offerings totalling $80 billion on June 1 — a $30 billion underwritten offering, a $40 billion at-the-market programme, and a $10 billion private placement to Berkshire Hathaway — and announced the upsizing and pricing at $84.75 billion on June 3. Its second-quarter release confirms $49.6 billion of net proceeds actually received in June from Class A, Class C and mandatory convertible preferred stock, to be used for general corporate purposes including capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute, with no shares yet sold under the at-the-market programme as of June 30. Equity raises by a company holding $242.5 billion in cash and securities are not liquidity events. They are a statement about the size of the forward commitment. Primary source: Alphabet Inc., investor news releases dated June 1 and June 3, 2026 — abc.xyz/investor/news; free writing prospectus filed June 1, 2026 — sec.gov; proceeds confirmed in the Q2 2026 earnings release · Retrieved 2026-08-01

April 29, 2026 — OpenAI says it has passed 10 GW of secured US capacity, three years early

Severity: Capacity entry (no dollar figure disclosed) · Entity: OpenAI · Type: Capacity commitment update

OpenAI states that the 10 GW of US AI infrastructure it committed to secure by 2029 when Stargate was announced in January 2025 has already been surpassed, with more than 3 GW added in the preceding 90 days, and that it is evaluating further sites beyond the initial goal. It also confirms GPT-5.5 was trained at the Abilene, Texas site, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and NVIDIA GB200 systems. No new dollar figure accompanies the milestone, and this entry logs none. Secured capacity, capacity under construction, and capacity actually serving tokens are three different quantities, and the announcement gigawatt is the loosest of the three. What is verifiable here is the contractual direction of travel, which is up. Primary source: OpenAI, Building the compute infrastructure for the Intelligence Age, April 29, 2026 — openai.com · Retrieved 2026-08-01

February 4, 2026 — Alphabet sets the 2026 bar at $175–185 billion, roughly double its 2025 spend

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Alphabet Inc. · Type: Initial full-year guidance

Alphabet’s fourth-quarter 2025 release states that 2026 capital expenditure investments are anticipated in the range of $175 to $185 billion. Axis computes Alphabet’s actual 2025 capital expenditure at $91.45 billion by summing the quarterly figures disclosed in Alphabet’s own releases ($39.64B first half + $23.95B Q3 + $27.85B Q4), which puts the initial 2026 plan at roughly twice the prior year before any of the raises that followed. Primary source: Alphabet Inc., Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Results, February 4, 2026 — abc.xyz/investor · Retrieved 2026-08-01

January 28, 2026 — Meta opens 2026 with a $115–135 billion plan after spending $72.2 billion in 2025

Severity: Tier 1 (≥$100B) · Entity: Meta Platforms, Inc. · Type: Initial full-year guidance

Meta reported full-year 2025 capital expenditures including finance lease principal of $72.22 billion, with $22.14 billion of that in the fourth quarter, and guided 2026 to $115–135 billion, attributing the step-up to its superintelligence lab effort and the core business. Six months later the floor of that range has moved up $15 billion. That is the entry this tracker exists to make visible. Primary source: Meta Platforms, Inc., Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results, January 28, 2026 — investor.atmeta.com · Retrieved 2026-08-01

How We Curate This List

The inclusion criteria are the methodology. They are published so that anyone can check whether an event we omitted should have been logged, or an event we logged should not have been.

What qualifies as an entry

An event is logged when it is dateable, publicly documented by the organization itself or in a regulatory filing, and changes the recorded or committed level of capital expenditure tied to AI compute infrastructure. In practice that means five event types:

1. Reported actuals — capital expenditure disclosed in an earnings release, filing, or company-hosted transcript.
2. Guidance issued or revised — a full-year or multi-year capex figure, including revisions driven by accounting policy rather than spending, which are logged and labelled as such.
3. Financings explicitly earmarked for AI infrastructure or compute in the issuer’s own language.
4. Site or capacity commitments carrying a disclosed dollar figure or a disclosed gigawatt figure.
5. Supplier capital budgets where the company ties the budget to AI or HPC demand.

What does not qualify

Analyst estimates and sell-side forecasts. Unnamed-source press reports. Memoranda of understanding and letters of intent without figures. Corporate announcements that use the phrase “AI investment” without a capex, dollar, or gigawatt number attached. Statistical projections of future industry-wide spending — those belong on our statistics pages, not here. This tracker logs discrete dateable events, not forecasts.

Boundary with the AI Data Center Tracker and the Electricity Demand Tracker

An event whose disclosed core is a power figure (megawatts, interconnection, PPA, grid filing) belongs to the Data Center Electricity Demand Tracker. An event whose disclosed core is a capital figure belongs here. Where a single announcement discloses both, it is logged in the tracker matching its primary disclosure and cross-linked from the other; it is never counted twice in either dataset’s totals.

Axis runs three trackers over adjacent ground, and the routing rule is the unit the announcing party actually disclosed, not the subject matter:

If the disclosed core is…	It belongs to	Metric that governs it
Dollars of the spending entity’s own capital — guidance, reported capex, financings	AI Capex Tracker (this page)	CAR™
Megawatts of a named asset — a campus, a lease, a site commitment	AI Data Center Tracker	CDR™
Grid load, interconnection queues, PPAs, utility filings	Data Center Electricity Demand Tracker	DCPI™

Three site commitments logged here in August 2026 — PORTS-Pike, Project Camellia and Meta’s Alberta campus — were removed on September 2 and now live only on the AI Data Center Tracker, where their megawatt figures drive CDR™. Nothing was retracted; the entries moved to the page whose unit they are expressed in.

Severity tiers

Assigned on the headline dollar figure of the event — the guidance midpoint for guidance entries, the reported figure for actuals.

Tier	Threshold	Meaning
Tier 1	≥ $100B	Annual-scale programme for a single entity
Tier 2	$25–99.9B	Multi-quarter programme, large financing, or supplier annual budget
Tier 3	$5–24.9B	Single-site or single-quarter scale
Tier 4	< $5B	Discrete project
Capacity	No dollar figure	Logged in GW; excluded from all dollar aggregates

Sourcing rules

Every entry links the document it was verified against, with the retrieval date. Earnings-call statements are accepted but flagged: a figure given verbally and not repeated in a filed document carries is_primary=no and a pending_primary verification flag naming the specific document that will resolve it. Flags are shown in the entry, in the dataset, and in the count at the top of this page — never buried. Where Axis computes a figure from disclosed inputs, the row carries axis_calculated=yes and the formula.

Corrections

Errors are corrected visibly and dated at the bottom of this page, never silently edited. Report one to [email protected]..

What Counts as “AI Capex”?

Capital expenditure is cash spent acquiring or building long-lived assets — in this context land, shells, power and cooling plant, networking, and servers including AI accelerators.

The definitional problem is real and we do not paper over it. Alphabet and Amazon report purchases of property and equipment. Meta and Microsoft include finance lease principal, which brings leased datacenter capacity inside the number. Amazon nets off sale proceeds and incentives. Oracle publishes a supplemental “net cash outlay” measure that subtracts customer prepayments. Four companies, four numbers that are not the same number.

Short-lived versus long-lived assets is the split that determines how fast spending can be turned off. Microsoft disclosed roughly two thirds of its June-quarter capex went to short-lived assets — chips, essentially — which are ordered on shorter lead times than concrete and substations.

What capex misses. Operating leases sit outside it entirely. So does third-party capacity rented rather than built, which Alphabet said it plans to lean on more heavily in the September quarter. So does customer-funded hardware, of which Oracle disclosed $75 billion. Any total assembled from capex lines understates the compute actually being brought online.

What We Did Not Log

Publishing the exclusions is part of the method. Three events circulating widely in the first half of August were assessed against the published criteria and kept out of the dataset. Each is listed with the specific criterion that excluded it and the disclosure that would let it in.

Nvidia’s reported investment of up to $3 billion in Lancium (reported August 7–9). Reuters, relaying reporting by The Information, described an initial $2 billion for roughly 20% of the Stargate site developer, with $1 billion more tied to grid milestones. Neither company issued an announcement, and both declined to comment. Excluded under unnamed-source press reports. It enters the tracker the day either party publishes or files it — not before, however many outlets repeat it. The reporting may well be accurate; accurate is not the same as sourced.

Dell’Oro Group’s forecast that data center capex passes $3 trillion by 2030 (August 18). A research-house projection, excluded under statistical projections of future industry-wide spending. Forecasts belong on our statistics pages with the forecaster named, not in a log of dated events.

Amazon’s July bond sale. Amazon’s own stated use of proceeds was general corporate purposes. Our criteria admit financings only where the issuer’s own language earmarks them for AI infrastructure or compute, so it stays out even though its purpose is widely assumed and probably obvious. The Alphabet equity raise in the log qualifies because Alphabet said in its own release what the money was for.

OpenAI’s reported increase in planned compute spending through 2030 to roughly $750 billion. Reported by the Wall Street Journal in late July. OpenAI has published no such figure. Excluded under unnamed-source press reports. A number of this magnitude, uncorroborated by any document, would be the single most damaging thing this tracker could carry.

NVIDIA’s $500 billion compute financing platform (announced August 26). NVIDIA’s own 8-K states the partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are subject to definitive agreements. The figure is logged inside the NVIDIA entry for the record and flagged, but it is excluded from every aggregate on this page. Half a trillion dollars of stated intent is not half a trillion dollars of committed capital, and the difference is the whole point of a tracker.

The reported “above $30 billion” full build-out cost for Project Camellia. Attributed to remarks by an OpenAI executive as reported by Bloomberg. No document from OpenAI, Effingham County or Georgia Power contains it. Excluded; the county’s disclosed $20 billion is logged instead, attributed to the county.

Update Log

Update, September 12, 2026. One entry added: Oracle’s Q1 FY2027 10-Q (Sept 10) — capex of $28.50 billion against $23.10 billion of operating cash flow, a CAR™ of 123.4%, and the disclosure that reframes the quarter: $288 billion of off-balance-sheet data center lease commitments, 3.1× Oracle’s entire stated FY2027 capex guidance.

Flag F-003 is resolved. Oracle’s fiscal 2027 capital plan was logged on June 10 as a call-sourced figure with a pending_primary flag. The 10-Q filed September 10 supplies filed-document confirmation of the underlying capital position, and the row’s is_primary value moves to yes. Two flags remain open: Amazon’s 2026 guidance and TSMC’s 2026 capital budget.

A pattern is now named rather than noted in passing. Three logged entries — Oracle’s $288B of leases, Meta’s $14B BlackRock venture, and PORTS-Pike — all move buildout into instruments that capital expenditure does not measure. The “What Counts as AI Capex?” section has been reordered to lead with that, because a tracker reporting only capex would show this sector decelerating while construction accelerates.

Update, September 2, 2026. One entry added and three removed. NVIDIA’s Q2 FY27 results (Aug 26) are logged: capex of $2.68 billion against $24.08 billion of operating cash flow, a CAR™ of 11.1% against the cohort’s 99.0%, plus a $500 billion third-party financing platform flagged subject_to_definitive_agreements and excluded from every aggregate.

Three entries were removed as duplicates, not as corrections. PORTS-Pike, Project Camellia and the Meta Alberta campus are site and capacity commitments whose disclosed core is megawatts, and all three are logged on the AI Data Center Tracker as AIDC-2026-013, AIDC-2026-012 and AIDC-2026-002. Carrying them here as well meant two Axis pages asserting the same facts, which is the exact failure the canonical number registry exists to prevent. No figure was altered and nothing was retracted — the entries live at their proper home and are cross-linked from the boundary section below. The rule now reads: if the disclosed core is dollars of the spending entity’s capital, it belongs here; if it is megawatts of an asset, it belongs on the Data Center Tracker.

An interactive table was added to the page. It is static HTML with JavaScript filtering only, so all 17 rows remain in the DOM for crawlers whether or not scripts execute, and every outbound link carries rel="nofollow".

Update, August 25, 2026. Two entries added, one of them a backfill. OpenAI’s PORTS-Pike agreement (Aug 17) — approximately 8 GW-IT in Pike County, Ohio, with SB Energy building and owning the asset under a 20-year lease and NVIDIA investing $1.5 billion in SB Energy. Project Camellia (Jul 22) — 3.2 GW in Effingham County, Georgia, backfilled after the July sweep missed it; this is the second month running that a July OpenAI announcement was caught late, and the watchlist has been amended to poll OpenAI’s Global Affairs feed weekly rather than relying on incident alerts. Two further exclusions recorded. Cohort CAR™ remains 99.0% — unchanged, and correctly so: no cohort filer has reported a new quarter since the baseline. Nothing in this update alters a previously published figure.

Update, August 19, 2026. One entry added: Axe Compute’s 55 MW, $500 million-plus agreements with Duos Technologies, disclosed in an 8-K filed August 17. Entry ordering corrected — the two backfilled Meta entries added on August 17 were placed at the top of the log rather than in date sequence, breaking the reverse-chronological rule; all seventeen entries are now correctly ordered, and no figure was altered in the correction. A “What We Did Not Log” section was added, recording three assessed exclusions. Cohort CAR™ remains 99.0%: no cohort filer has reported a new quarter, and the correct behaviour for an unchanged metric is to leave it unchanged.

Update, August 17, 2026. Six entries added: CoreWeave’s Q2 results and guidance raise (Aug 11), TSMC’s board capital appropriation (Aug 11), Riot Platforms’ 191 MW lease (Aug 10), Bitdeer’s Tydal lease (Aug 4), and two backfilled entries that predate the tracker’s launch sweep — Meta’s BlackRock venture in El Paso (Jul 28) and Meta’s Alberta groundbreaking (Jul 8). Both backfills were missed because the launch sweep ran from August 1 and did not extend back through July; the source watchlist procedure has been amended so each new tracker opens with a 90-day retrospective sweep. The TSMC verification flag was narrowed after its Q2 earnings presentation was located on SEC EDGAR: quarterly capex and cash flow are now primary-sourced, and only the annual capital budget remains unverified. Two supplementary CAR™ readings were added for TSMC and CoreWeave, outside cohort v1.0. No published figure was changed, and the cohort CAR™ reading of 99.0% is unchanged — no tracked filer has reported a new quarter since the baseline.

Archive

Pre-2026 entries

The archive opens with the 2026 fiscal-year guidance cycle. Entries covering 2024–2025 capital expenditure disclosures will be backfilled from primary filings and dated on addition; none have been backfilled as of this update, and no figures have been carried over from secondary summaries.

Download the AI Capex Dataset

ai-capex-tracker.csv — every entry above as structured rows, with full provenance columns (source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary, axis_calculated, method_note, verification_flag). UTF-8, comma-separated, ISO 8601 dates, raw values with units in a separate column. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, AI Capex Tracker, 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much are the big four hyperscalers spending on AI capex in 2026?

Their current full-year guidance midpoints sum to approximately $732.5 billion: Alphabet $195–205 billion, Amazon approximately $220 billion, Microsoft approximately $175 billion, and Meta $130–145 billion. Axis Intelligence Research labels that sum an estimate rather than a finding, because the four figures use three different capex definitions and two of them come from earnings calls rather than filed documents.

What is the Capex Absorption Ratio?

It is capital expenditure divided by operating cash flow for the same quarter, published by Axis Intelligence Research. The inaugural cohort reading, for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, is 99.0% across Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.

Which hyperscaler has raised its 2026 capex guidance the most?

Alphabet, by midpoint: from $175–185 billion in February to $195–205 billion in July, an 11.1% increase. Meta’s midpoint rose 10.0% over the same period.

Did Microsoft cut its AI spending in 2026?

No. Microsoft’s expected calendar-2026 capital expenditure figure moved to approximately $175 billion because extending datacenter useful lives from 15 to 25 years shifts future leases from finance leases, which count inside capex, to operating leases, which do not. Microsoft’s CFO stated that underlying calendar-2026 investment expectations were otherwise unchanged and that fiscal 2027 capex will grow.

Why did free cash flow turn negative at several of these companies?

Because capital expenditure grew faster than operating cash flow. Alphabet reported negative $5.9 billion of free cash flow in the June quarter, Amazon negative $7.6 billion on a trailing-twelve-month basis, and Oracle negative $23.7 billion for its fiscal 2026 — all disclosed in the companies’ own reconciliations.

How often is this tracker updated?

Within 48 hours of any qualifying disclosure, with a full sweep of tracked filers within 72 hours of each earnings quarter closing. The date and time of the most recent update appear at the top of the page.

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How to Cite This Tracker

APA — Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). AI Capex Tracker. https://axis-intelligence.com/ai-capex-tracker/

MLA — Axis Intelligence Research. “AI Capex Tracker.” Axis Intelligence, 2026, axis-intelligence.com/ai-capex-tracker/.

Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research. “AI Capex Tracker.” Axis Intelligence, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/ai-capex-tracker/.