SEATTLE — Amazon now spends more money on property and equipment than its entire business generates in cash. The company publishes that fact itself, in a small reconciliation table near the back of its quarterly filing, and it is the most important number in American technology this month.
Over the twelve months to June 30, Amazon’s operations produced $161.4 billion of cash, up a third on the year before. Over the same twelve months it spent $169.0 billion on property and equipment, net of what it sold. The difference is free cash flow, and Amazon reports it as minus $7.6 billion.
A year earlier the same measure was positive $18.2 billion.
Amazon rose 1.27 per cent to $261.91 on Monday afternoon and remains the least damaged megacap in the market, 8.8 per cent below its 52-week high. Investors are not punishing this. It is worth understanding what they are accepting.
AMZN Stock Today: The Shallowest Drawdown of the Group
| Company | Price | Session | Below 52-week high |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon (AMZN) | $261.91 | +1.27% | -8.8% |
| Apple (AAPL) | $311.77 | +0.78% | -9.5% |
| Microsoft (MSFT) | $487.89 | +0.96% | -11.9% |
| Alphabet (GOOGL) | $348.39 | +1.04% | -14.7% |
| Meta Platforms (META) | $560.47 | +1.92% | -29.1% |
| Nvidia (NVDA) | $209.29 | -2.53% | -11.5% |
| Micron Technology (MU) | $914.18 | -5.44% | -27.2% |
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | 53,437.37 | +0.30% | -2.4% |
| Live intraday quotes, not settlements. Distance from the 52-week high is Eastern Herald’s calculation from the quoted price. Amazon is a member of both the Dow and the Nasdaq 100. | |||
The Line Amazon Publishes About Itself
The figures below are lifted directly from the quarterly report Amazon filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is the company’s own reconciliation, not an outside calculation.
| Measure | TTM to Jun 2025 ($m) | TTM to Jun 2026 ($m) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net cash from operating activities | 121,137 | 161,403 | +33% |
| Purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds | (102,953) | (169,007) | +64% |
| Free cash flow | 18,184 | (7,604) | swing of $25.8bn |
| Net cash used in investing activities | (123,569) | (216,775) | +75% |
| Net cash from financing activities | (8,652) | 75,160 | swing of $83.8bn |
| Figures as reported by Amazon. Percentage changes and the swing figures are Eastern Herald’s arithmetic. Free cash flow is a non-GAAP measure and Amazon notes its limitations, including that it omits principal reductions of debt. Purchases of property and equipment cover the whole company, including fulfilment and logistics, not only data centres. | |||
Two lines in that table carry the story. Free cash flow swung by $25.8 billion in a year and crossed into negative territory. And financing swung by $83.8 billion, from paying $8.7 billion out to taking $75.2 billion in.
That is where the money came from. Amazon did not fund a 64 per cent increase in capital spending out of operations, because operations, large as they are, could not cover it. It went to the debt and financing markets for roughly $75 billion.
The Business Underneath Is Still Growing Fast
None of this is distress. Quarterly net sales reached $200.6 billion, up 19.6 per cent from $167.7 billion a year earlier, and first-half sales were $382.1 billion against $323.4 billion. Operating cash flow rose a third. This is an expanding, cash-generative company that has chosen to outspend its own cash generation.
Amazon’s advantage over the other large spenders is that its capacity sells itself by the hour. Money spent on servers lands in a segment that bills customers and reports revenue every quarter. A company building capacity for an internal model has to explain a longer chain of reasoning before the cash reappears.
There is also a smaller disclosure worth noting, because it shows how far the buildout now reaches. Amazon carries power purchase agreements covering megawatt-hours to be delivered beyond the next nine years, and marks them to fair value. Those marks produced $551 million of net unrealised gains in the quarter, recorded within technology and infrastructure costs and principally affecting the cloud segment. The company is now large enough in electricity that the price of power moves its operating expenses.
Everyone Is Financing This, in Different Ways
Set Amazon beside its peers and a pattern emerges that no single filing shows on its own.
Meta issued $24.9 billion of senior unsecured notes in May and escrowed $10.8 billion under multi-year infrastructure agreements. Intel sold $23 billion of new equity at $95 a share and now trades below it. AMD has written warrants over a fifth of itself and guarantees $4.1 billion of its partners’ data centre leases. Amazon took $75.2 billion from the financing markets.
Four companies, four instruments, one direction. The capital for this buildout is increasingly coming from outside the operating businesses that are supposed to justify it, and Broadcom’s $164.6 billion of committed orders is the receipt on the other side of those transactions.
Why Monday Favoured Amazon
The session was a rotation out of semiconductors into large-cap technology with visible cash flows. The chip index fell 2.40 per cent while the Dow rose 0.30 per cent, and every megacap gained. Our Nasdaq column found half the largest Nasdaq companies higher on the day, and the S&P 500 column found six of eleven sectors up.
There is a mild irony in Amazon being the beneficiary. Investors moved into the stock with the deepest negative free cash flow in the group on a day they were selling the companies it buys from.
What This Column Cannot Tell You Yet
We cannot separate Amazon’s data centre spending from the rest. Purchases of property and equipment is one line covering fulfilment centres, delivery vehicles, offices and servers alike, and Amazon does not break it out. Anyone attributing the whole $169 billion to artificial intelligence is guessing, and so is anyone attributing only part of it.
We also do not know the depreciation schedule applied to the accelerators inside that figure. A data centre building lasts decades; the servers in it last a handful of years. The mix determines how quickly this capital becomes an expense, it is set by management, and it is not recoverable from the filings as they stand. Negative free cash flow is a fact this year. Whether it was a good trade is a question the depreciation schedule answers three years from now.
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