Capex
Capital expenditure; money spent by a company to acquire or upgrade physical assets like data centers and compute infrastructure.
Capital expenditure (capex) refers to funds used by a company to purchase, maintain, or improve long-term physical assets. In the context of AI companies, capex primarily means spending on data centers, GPUs, networking equipment, and other compute infrastructure needed to train and serve large language models. Alphabet's 2026 capex guidance of $175-185 billion represents one of the largest infrastructure investment commitments in corporate history.
Also known as
capital expenditure, capital spending