Capital expenditures (capex)
Capital expenditures are the cash a company pays in a period for property, plant and equipment it expects to use for more than a year, reported as an investing outflow on the cash flow statement.
The figure is cash, not accounting cost. An asset bought on credit, financed through a lease or received but not yet paid for does not appear in capital expenditures until the cash leaves, which is why a company can install more equipment in a quarter than its capex shows, and pay for it in the next.
Capital expenditures are company-wide. A retailer’s include warehouses, a cloud provider’s include offices and a utility’s include power plants. No filer reports an AI line, and any AI capex figure in circulation is an estimate by someone other than the company.
How this site measures it
This site reads purchases of property and equipment from each company’s structured cash flow statement, latest-filed value per period, with fourth quarters derived as the fiscal year less the first nine months. Where a company nets proceeds from sales and incentives against purchases, the earnings release figure is shown separately and labelled.
Questions this page answers
- Is capex the same as investment?
- Capital expenditures are one kind of investment: cash spent on physical and certain intangible assets. Acquisitions of companies, purchases of securities and spending on research are reported elsewhere.
- Why can capex guidance differ from reported capex?
- Companies often guide to a figure that includes assets acquired under finance leases, while the cash flow statement reports cash purchases only. The two can differ by billions in a quarter.
Where it is used
Every company page states it, for example Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and the companies page sorts all twenty-one. It decides the questions spending above cash flow and spending growth.
Related terms: Free cash flow, Finance leases and capex, Accrued capex, Capex versus depreciation.