Hyperscaler Capex as a Share of U.S. GDP (Trailing 12 Months)

## What this measures

How large the four biggest cloud companies' spending on buildings and equipment is next to the U.S. economy: the combined capital expenditure of Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon over the last four quarters (capex.hyperscalers.ttm), divided by U.S. nominal GDP over the same four quarters, in percent. Quarterly, at each calendar quarter end.

## Why it matters

Most of this spending is data centres, servers and chips for AI. Putting it against GDP shows the build-out at the scale of the whole economy rather than in dollars, which grow with inflation and the economy itself.

## How to read it

GDP is published as a seasonally adjusted annual rate each quarter, so the denominator is the average of the four quarters' rates, the same four quarters the capex covers. A quarter appears once its GDP and all four companies' filings are out, so the newest quarter can lag the capex series by a few weeks.

## What it does not say

It is all of these four companies' capital expenditure, not only AI: it includes offices, Amazon's warehouses and delivery network, and network equipment. It covers four companies, not Oracle, xAI, OpenAI's partners, chip makers or utilities, and it counts spending wherever it happens, while GDP is U.S. output, so it is a yardstick rather than a share of GDP in the national-accounts sense. It is filed spending to date, not a projection. It is not the measure in Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's work on the AI build-out, which projects spending through 2032 and compares it with past investment booms. Capex excludes assets acquired under finance leases, which Microsoft and Amazon add to their headline capex figures, so it reads below the companies' own totals.

## Source

Capital expenditure: cash purchases of property and equipment from each company's 10-Q and 10-K filings, SEC EDGAR XBRL (public domain), as in capex.hyperscalers.ttm. GDP: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, gross domestic product, current dollars, seasonally adjusted annual rate (public domain), as in fred_gdp_nominal. Ratio calculated by Palanor; each point's metadata carries the capex and the four-quarter GDP average used.