Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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It’s that most magical time of the year: HyperCAPEX season! Meta and Microsoft are in; Amazon and Google report next week. Full annual retrospective to follow (last quarter’s and last year’s if you can’t wait).
One previously unannounced Platformonomics service is laundering jokes for people with even less of a platform than me or a day job that makes cracking wise awkward. We’ll print them here (and of course take full authorial credit!). Send them my way!
News
Meta CAPEX – Q4 2025
$22.14 billion, up 14% from Q3, 49% from a year ago (including finance leases which were a mere 3% of total spend).
Guidance for 2026 CAPEX keeps growing:
We anticipate 2026 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $115-135 billion, with year-over-year growth driven by increased investment to support our Meta Superintelligence Labs efforts and core business.
But demands for compute resources across the company have increased even faster than our supply.
The core business is humming, so there is less urgency to answer the question of what new revenue streams will help pay for all that infrastructure investment. And the new models have yet to ship, so we don’t know whether Meta will really be on the frontier.
I need to dig into the 10-K and see if they give us any more detail on the SPV CAPEX.
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Microsoft CAPEX – Q4 2025
$37.5 billion, up 7% from Q3, 66% from a year ago (including finance leases which have dropped back down to 20% of spend after last quarter’s gaudy 44%).
Capital expenditures were $37.5 billion, and this quarter, roughly two thirds of our capex was on short-lived assets, primarily GPUs and CPUs. Our customer demand continues to exceed our supply.
The remaining spend was for long-lived assets that will support monetization for the next 15 years and beyond. This quarter, total finance leases were $6.7 billion and were primarily for large datacenter sites. And cash paid for P, P, and E was $29.9 billion.
Guidance:
we expect capital expenditures to decrease on a sequential basis due to the normal variability from cloud infrastructure buildouts and the timing of delivery of finance leases. As we work to close the gap between demand and supply, we expect the mix of short-lived assets to remain similar to Q2.
Commercial remaining performance obligation, which continues to be reported net of reserves, increased to $625 billion and was up 110% year-over-year with a weighted average duration of approximately two and a half years. Roughly 25% will be recognized in revenue in the next 12 months, up 39% year-over-year. The remaining portion recognized beyond the next 12 months increased 156%. Approximately 45% of our commercial RPO balance is from OpenAI.
Wall Street is quite grumpy about the CAPEX spend and/or Azure growth missing by a point (the stock was down ~12%). We are required to celebrate CAPEX spend here, but using Oracle’s “hey look at our OpenAI RPO” gambit seems incredibly stupid given the database vampire’s stock has more than halved playing that game.
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Follow the CAPEX: Q3 2025 Scoreboard, Microsoft CAPEX – Q2 2025, Microsoft CAPEX – Q1 2025, Microsoft CAPEX – Q1 2025, Microsoft CAPEX – Q4 2024, Microsoft CAPEX – Q3 2024, Q2 Microsoft CAPEX, Q1 Microsoft CAPEX, CAPEX Clues: Satya’s Oft-Mentioned $80 Billion. Plus Farming, CAPEX Clues: Microsoft Moves
Is OpenAI’s Too Big to Fail Strategy Working?
The Company is Named OpenAI, not FocusedAI
OpenAI’s expectation they would win every imaginable AI-related business with half-assed efforts in each isn’t panning out, but they’re still trying. Including the enterprise:
Over a lavish multicourse dinner accompanied by fine wines, Altman told attendees OpenAI could be a one-stop shop for all their AI needs…
Not exactly tearing up the legacy enterprise playbook for the AI era.
Remaining CAPEX Obligation: Divestiture Edition
Investment bankers are now playing fantasy financing games with overextended Oracle.
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Allocating Oracle’s Capital, They Don’t Have the Money: Who Could Possibly Have Guessed?, Oracle Disappoints: Q2 FY26, Oracle’s Remaining CAPEX Obligation: Q2 FY26, Oracle Still Can’t Build Data Centers: Q2 FY26, Oracle: Not Even a REIT?, They Still Don’t Have the Margins: Oracle Edition, They Don’t Have the Margins, They Don’t Have the Money, They Don’t Have the Money: Oracle and Tik Tok, Why Can’t Oracle Afford Data Centers?
ClownWatch™: IBM Q4 2025
Quantum meme stock IBM had a massive jummp in CAPEX: up 30%. A $128 million increase! That could be several dozen Blackwell servers!
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ClownWatch™: IBM Q3 2025, Are Markets Efficient?: IBM Edition, Godwin’s Law for AI: Curing Cancer, The Mainframe is the Solution! What Was the Question?, ClownWatch™: IBM Q4 2024, ClownWatch™: IBM Reports Negative CAPEX, Follow the CAPEX: The Clown Car Race Checkered Flag, Introducing Platformonomics ClownWatch™, IBM is Not a Technology Company: Employees Agree, IBM is Not a Technology Company: Layoffs Are Their Specialty, IBM is Not a Technology Company: But Ecstatic to be Treated Like One, IBM is Not a Technology Company: McDonald’s Edition,
Automating the Federal Reserve: January 2026 Decision
Our Federal Reserve AI agent said no change in rates last week. The Federal Open Market Committee concurred this week.
Instead of settling for one of those inherently flawed humans, we could have gone with the AI agent…
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Automating the Federal Reserve: January 2026, Bringing the Federal Reserve into the Agentic Era, Let a Bot Run the Federal Reserve: 2021 Edition, Nominating a Bot to the Federal Reserve Doesn’t Seem So Crazy Now Does It?, Forget Summers and Yellen: Let a Bot Run the Federal Reserve, Hoping for Change: Monetary Policy Edition
Taking the High Ground From the Sub-basement
Private Equity in Action: From Famed to Fraught
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Perfidious Private Equity, Software Migration Alerts for Private Equity Owned Companies, Private Equity in Action: Yet Another Breach, Private Equity in Action: I’m Lovin’ It, Private Equity in Action: Narrative Collapse?, Private Equity in Action: The Great Garage Door Service Wars, Private Equity in Action: Unlocking “AI Database Company” Value, Private Equity in Action: CareerBuilder + Monster, Private Equity in Action: Having to Show Their Math is New Experience, Private Equity in Action: Underperforming, Private Equity in Action: Trying to Eat the World, Private Equity in Action: Fast Casual Restaurant Edition, Private Equity in Action: WP Engine, Perfidious Private Equity, Private Equity in Action: Thrasio, Private Equity in Action: “How PE Keeps Planes in the Air”, Private Equity in Action: OtterTune,Private Equity in Action: PluralSight, Private Equity Will Buy and Ruin More Software Companies
Not Available in Europe: An EU Twitter Competitor?
Alas, the EU is not actually building a Twitter competitor, which would have been even funnier than their previous technological endeavors/historical footnotes (e.g. search engine competitor Quaero and cloud competitor GAIA-X).
Presumably the EU ran the numbers and realized fining US companies penciled out far better for them than actually trying to build something.
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Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk: Tesla Shareholder Edition
Not taking the dependency is easier said than done…
Fractional CEO Elon Musk’s defractionalization of his empire is going to be epic. So. Many. Related. Party. Transactions. xAI really needs cash and he’s given up on Tesla, despite the trillion dollar pay package.
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Quick Hits
Here we relegate 1.) punchlines you can write yourself 2.) topics I’ve beaten to death and/or 3.) uncharacteristically succinct points.
- The Tik Tok “transition”deal” is an absolute travesty in every dimension: rule of law, swapping one censor for another, preposterous explanations for censorship (a power outage!), continued CCP involvement, flagrant cronyism, uptime (or lack thereof), absolutely ridiculous terms of use, to name a few.
- Bronny’s Boffo Bid: The challenges facing the Ellisons’ media empire (tl;dr actually running said media empire)
- Bronny Boffo Bid: The Ellison Way of Parenting (tl;dr will Larry raise Bronny’s allowance?)
- AGI Inc files for 43.64M share IPO at $15-$18/sh – why wait for an Anthropic or OpenAI IPO?