How the figures are built
AI Financials follows the money behind AI infrastructure across 67 companies: what they spend, what they have committed to, and how they pay for it. Every figure is one of three things — something a company itself reported, a forward-looking figure in the company's own words, or an estimate that is labelled as one. Rules read the figures, not people; a rule that reads a number wrong is fixed as a rule, never by editing the number. Where a company does not state a figure, the site shows nothing rather than a zero.
SpendingCAPEX, quarter by quarter
Basis. CAPEX is the cash a company spends on property and equipment, under one definition for every company. Equipment taken on through leases is not in it; where a company's own headline figure includes it, the site says so beside the number.
- →Companies report their spending as a running total through their fiscal year. Each standalone quarter is rebuilt from those running totals, and each period is read by its own dates, never by the label of the report that carries it.
- →Fiscal years are set on the calendar by the middle of each period: Apple's quarter ending July 1 is the June quarter, and NVIDIA's November–January quarter is the fourth.
- →When a company restates a period, the later figure replaces the earlier one.
- →A known-true year guards the rule: Amazon's 2024 quarters add up to $83.0B, as its annual report states.
FinancingCommitments, debt and what it costs
- →Leases signed but not yet begun — often the largest commitment of all, and one no balance sheet carries — are read from the companies' own words, sentence by sentence. A company that does not state the figure shows none; a figure is never inferred.
- →Purchase obligations and lease liabilities as each company states them. The off-balance-sheet share sets what is committed but not yet owed beside what is owed; two figures a company states as one fact are counted once.
- →Debt is read off each company's own balance sheet, line by line — notes, convertibles, term loans, revolver draws — with the current portion wherever the balance sheet tucks it into another line. Short-term borrowings are kept apart. The debt of funds an asset manager consolidates is listed apart too: it is the funds', not the manager's. The rule was checked by hand against more than a hundred balance sheets.
- →New borrowing is ledgered as it happens: every bond tranche with its coupon and maturity, every loan as signed. Amounts stay in their own currency, with the dollar figure at the rate of the day.
- →What comes due when is shown as two ladders, never mixed: the companies' own schedule for all their debt, and the borrowing we have ledgered, by year of maturity.
- →The rate is four times the quarter's interest cost, divided by the average of funded debt at the start and the end of the quarter. Funded debt is borrowings plus finance lease liabilities, because the interest a company reports includes the interest on its finance leases — a rate over borrowings alone would overstate what the largest lessees pay. Leases are added only where the debt lines do not already hold them.
- →The interest cost counts what a company that builds adds to the cost of its fabs, data centres and plants: the interest it capitalises, which its interest expense leaves out — for some, a third to a half of what their debt costs. Where a company gives that figure only for the whole year and it is large, its quarters show no rate rather than one that is too low.
- →An asset manager's consolidated funds stay out of its debt; but where its interest expense pays for their borrowing, the rate divides by both, so the two halves of the fraction speak of the same money.
- →Two more columns give the conventions others use — interest over borrowings alone, and the net interest line over borrowings — so any chart can be reconciled.
- →Nothing is estimated: a missing or non-positive input gives no rate. When the previous quarter's debt is not known, the most recent earlier figure within a year stands in, and the row says so.
- →Equity raised is read by instrument — offerings, convertibles, preferreds — and at-the-market programmes by what was actually sold, not by the size of the programme.
- →Around the companies: the securitisations that fund data centres and how they are rated, where investors mark the chain's bonds and who holds them, and the private loans only their lenders disclose.
- →A self-check sets the new borrowing we have ledgered against each company's own rise in debt: where the two disagree, the page says by how much.
KPIsArithmetic, not opinion
Each KPI on the AI trade page is a stated formula over the figures above, and each row carries that formula in words — “operating cash flow $40.0B ÷ capex $80.0B over four quarters”. Nothing is scored, ranked or forecast. A figure a company does not report is absent, with the missing input named; a ratio whose two parts are not of the same moment is left empty and says why.
Currency
Every figure stays in the currency the company reports it in. The dollar figure beside it uses one method for every company — the average rate over the period for flows, the rate on the day for balances — and the rate used is kept with the figure.
Keeping it right
- →Every rule is tested against figures read by hand, and a rule that changes is run again over everything it reads.
- →Audits read samples of the documents by hand and measure what each rule misses; each kind of miss becomes a check.
- →A figure out of line with its own history is flagged for a person to read before anyone trusts it.
- →Nobody edits a figure by hand. A wrong number is a wrong rule: the rule is fixed, and everything it read is read again.
What we don't claim
- →An estimate is labelled as one and never shown as a company's own figure.
- →A figure a company does not state is absent, never a zero.
- →No model writes a figure: every number comes from a company's own words or statements, through a rule.
- →Nothing here is investment advice; the figures are as the companies report them.