AI capex
Capital spending on AI infrastructure, such as data-center buildings, servers, accelerators, networking and power equipment.
Capital expenditure (capex) is money spent on long-lived assets. AI capex is the part aimed at AI workloads, mainly data centers and the chips and systems inside them. Companies report capex in their cash-flow statements, and many give a capex outlook for the year.
Traders care because AI capex is revenue for chip, memory, networking, power and construction suppliers, and a cost for the spender. Higher capex lowers free cash flow in the near term and raises depreciation in later years. Watch whether guided capex rises faster than the cloud or AI revenue it is meant to support.
Worked example (illustrative numbers, not real data): a company spends 8 billion dollars on AI infrastructure in one year and depreciates it straight-line over 5 years. That adds 1.6 billion dollars of depreciation expense each year, which lowers reported operating profit even if revenue is unchanged.