How much cash have Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft paid for property and equipment?

What this number cannot tell you

• Capital spending here is the cash a company paid for property, plant and equipment in its fiscal year, the line of its cash flow statement that the SEC data labels payments to acquire property, plant and equipment, in US dollars as the company filed it.
• It leaves out finance leases and similar additions that pay no cash, which many published figures include, and every forecast or plan: only what a filing reports as paid.
• The companies file no line for artificial intelligence. These pages show all of their capital spending, whatever it was for, and make no claim about how much of it was for any one purpose.
• The SEC data holds this figure under two labels. A company is read under the label for property, plant and equipment, and in a year in which it has none under that label, under the label for productive assets (Amazon files its line under that one). The two are never added.
• Each company's figure is for its own fiscal year, placed in the calendar year the fiscal year ends in, so the figures of the four companies do not end on the same day: the table gives the day each one ends. A year ending in the first week of January is placed in the year before.
• A year in which a company has no value is shown as missing, never as zero, and the combined line is drawn for a year only when all four companies have a value for it. A value is missing when the company filed none that these pages read, or when a check refused it.
• A company that files this figure under a label we do not read is not counted, so some large spenders are missing.
• A parent and a subsidiary that both file are both counted unless the subsidiary is on a reviewed list, so a subsidiary not on it is counted again inside its parent's figure. A company is counted once when two filing numbers give the same figure for the same period under the same name apart from its legal form (Inc, Corp, plc).
• A reviewed list of 72 trusts and funds whose shares trade like stocks is left out. A reviewed list of 31 filers whose capital spending is part of another filer's is left out of the years in which that filer has a value.
• A period is counted only when it is a full year of 350 to 380 days that ends within sixty days of the company's fiscal year end. A value is left out when a check refuses it: the SEC data's own checks, a company whose newest figure is a jump nothing confirms, or a value that is not above zero in the ranking.
• 2025 is not final: some filers have not filed that year yet and some have stopped filing, and a year is shown only when it holds at least four fifths as many filers as the year before.
• The number of filers differs from year to year (see the Filers column), so the sum of all filers can move because of the filers counted as well as the amounts.
• A company's own page can name a year otherwise: a year shown here under one name can carry another name on its company page, and its capital spending there is read under the property label alone.