Cloud and Device Buyers, Q3 2026

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Apple are the cloud and device buyers in the Q3 2026 earnings roundup. They are buyers of memory and storage, not makers. This page reads their quarters for one signal: how much each spent on property and equipment, and what that did to its operating margin. The Earnings Desk holds the other quarters and the other groups.

The four cloud companies spent about $203 billion in the quarter, a little more than twice what they spent a year earlier, while Apple spent $2.2 billion. My reading is that this spending turns into orders for HBM and NAND, though no release makes that link.

Findings

Each of the four cloud companies spent more than in the quarter before. Microsoft put $39.4 billion into property and equipment in its fiscal first quarter of 2027, Alphabet $51.4 billion, Amazon $77.3 billion and Meta $34.91 billion. Added up, that is $202.9 billion by my arithmetic, 22.2% more than the $166.0 billion the same four spent in the second quarter and 107.5% more than the $97.8 billion in the third quarter of 2025. The totals come from the second quarter 2026 releases of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, and from their third quarter 2025 releases for Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta.

The figures are not defined the same way. Microsoft and Alphabet report cash additions to property and equipment, Amazon reports purchases before proceeds from sales and incentives, and Meta includes principal payments on finance leases. Apple prints only year to date cash flow, so its $2.2 billion for the quarter is my arithmetic from those figures.

The cloud lines grew faster than the companies around them. Microsoft’s Azure grew 48% from a year earlier and Microsoft Cloud reached $63.9 billion, while Google Cloud’s revenue was $30.7 billion against $15.2 billion a year earlier and AWS’s was $46 billion against $33 billion.

Spending also took a large share of each sale. By my arithmetic Meta spent 54.0% of its revenue on capital spending, Microsoft 42.7%, Alphabet 40.2% and Amazon 38.3%, against 2.0% at Apple. Each share is a plain ratio of two figures the releases print.

Margins did not move together. Microsoft’s operating income was $45.9 billion on $92.3 billion of revenue, and Alphabet’s margin was 31.8%, down from 34% in its second quarter release. Amazon’s was 13.9%, and Apple’s 31.1%. Meta’s fell to 20% from 31% in its second quarter and 40% in the third quarter of 2025, but its quarter includes a $9.89 billion charge for an agreement with 52 attorneys general, and without it income from operations would have been $22.88 billion.

What the quarter leaves out

The releases the desk reads do not say how much of each company’s spending goes to memory or storage. The step from capital spending to memory orders is my reading, not a figure any of them prints. The Earnings Desk shows the earlier quarters for all five.