The data center decade.
Five companies are building the physical layer of the AI era, and unlike almost every other number in this story, their spending is filed. This report reads the capital-expenditure line of Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia straight from SEC XBRL — 37 filed figures, each with its accession receipt — and finds a shape: a long climb, a dip in fiscal 2023, then the steepest two years in the nine filed here. Beside it, the announced economy: three commitments whose ceilings alone exceed the five builders’ biggest filed year. Every figure on this page is computed from the records at render time.
published 2026-08-27 · data cutoff 2026-08-27 · edition 1 — updated only by a new dated edition
Nine fiscal years, five builders, one line each.
Filed capital expenditure, company by company. Nvidia enters this tag set at FY2022 — earlier sums count four builders, later ones five, and the 5.2× headline compares those two sums as filed. Switch to INDEXED and every company restarts at 100 in its first filed year — the slope, not the size, becomes the story. The company chips isolate any subset. Fiscal years differ by company — Microsoft’s ends in June, Nvidia’s in January — and the method says so rather than pretending alignment.
The dip before the sprint.
Year-over-year change in the five builders’ combined filed capex, complete fiscal years only. The shape nobody remembers: fiscal 2023 was NEGATIVE — the builders cut capex together — and then came the two steepest years of the window. Whatever the AI build-out is, in the filings it has a birthday.
Two economies, one scale.
On the left, the filed economy: what the five builders actually reported spending in their latest complete fiscal year, receipts attached. On the right, the announced economy: three commitments from the Circular Machine whose stated ceilings alone total $430B — more than the five builders’ biggest filed year combined. Same dollar scale, never summed together: one column is history, the other is press.
All thirty-seven, receipts attached.
Every filed figure on this page, with its XBRL tag and a link to the filing index on EDGAR. Deliberately the last view: a table is the record, not the story.
How this was made, and its limits.
The data is official and the pipeline is ours. The diagram is the whole method; the cards are its limits — stated, not buried. We provide no data: every figure traces to a filing a reader can pull, and the download on the hub is a verification extract.
Four things the filings show.
Edition 2 — figures unchanged in every row; provenance corrected: tag labels replaced by the resolvable us-gaap concepts that reproduce them (AMZN·NVDA PaymentsToAcquireProductiveAssets; GOOGL·MSFT·META PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment).