Articles

How tech businesses work, explained across the companies we cover. About five minutes each, every figure from the filings.

Cloud & data

Where does the cloud's money go?

Into buildings, power and chips: the five biggest builders spent $464.6 billion on capital spending in their latest fiscal years, 4.6 times what they spent five years earlier.

  • Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Oracle spent $464.6 billion on capital spending in their latest fiscal years, against $100.3 billion five years earlier.
  • Their revenue roughly doubled over the same years. Their capital spending grew more than four times.
  • Oracle spent $55.7 billion, 82.6% of its revenue and more than the $32.0 billion its operations brought in.
Newest first
  1. AI & semiconductorsPlusWhy does Intel spend ten times more of its revenue on equipment than NVIDIA?Because Intel makes most of its own chips and NVIDIA pays others to make them: Intel's capital spending was 27.7% of its 2025 revenue, NVIDIA's 2.8%.
  2. Cloud & dataPlusHow can a company lose money and still make cash?By paying much of its staff in equity, a cost that uses no cash: Snowflake lost $1.4 billion on its operations in fiscal 2026 and still made $1.1 billion of free cash flow.
  3. Developer toolsWhy does Atlassian spend half its revenue on research and development?Because a software company's main cost is the people who build it: Atlassian put 49.7% of its fiscal 2026 revenue into R&D, while Apple's $45.8 billion was 9.6% of its own.