Cloud service providers, biggest portion of their capital expenditures

[MikeJames]

Microsoft, for example, spent $1.5 billion in the last quarter to support demand growth for its cloud services, Amy Hood, the company’s CFO, said on the earnings call with analysts Thursday. Google’s capital expenditures for the quarter were about $2.4 billion, spent primarily on production equipment, data center construction, and facilities.

On Amazon’s earnings call, also on Thursday, Phil Hardin, director of investment relations at Amazon, said data center expenses that go into expanding or establishing cloud regions are “really lumpy,” meaning it requires spending big sums in short periods of time to deploy new data center infrastructure to support the rapidly growing and highly profitable Amazon Web Services business.