capital expenditure

While massive AI capital expenditures are seeing free cash flows at Big Tech companies trend downward or turn negative, other areas of the market are seeing the opposite effect.

Buybacks are typically funded by a company’s free cash flow—the money left after operating costs and capital expenditures.

The figures are impressive but represent a fairly small commitment on an annual basis as part of Alphabet’s total capital expenditure.

Stock market bulls can point to the productivity promise of artificial intelligence and the 19-fold investment jump since 2010 of the largest tech firms into research and development and capital expenditure.

Both types of AI are likely to require huge amounts of capital expenditure.