Now that just about all S&P 500 firms have filed their Q2 earnings reports, let’s take a closer look at financial performance and economic trends hidden within those numbers. First up: capex spending.

Capital expenditures are always a useful disclosure to observe because it helps analysts understand broader economic trends. If capex is rising, that means firms are confident enough in their business prospects to make more investments for long-term growth. If it’s falling, that suggests businesses are less confident about future growth and would rather preserve cash.

The debate these days, of course, is whether capex spending for corporations as a whole is being distorted by a small number of tech firms spending zillions of dollars on AI data centers — and whether, if you strip those AI hyperscalers out of the analysis, capex spending is not as good as the overall number seems. So the Calcbench research team (read: intern trying to look busy) used our Multi-Company page to investigate.

Answer: yes. The AI hyperscalers are skewing the capex spending curve for everyone else.

Specifically, the S&P 500 reported $416.77 billion in net capital expenditures in Q2 2026. That’s a 32.5 percent increase from the $314.44 billion reported in Q2 2025. Sounds good so far, right? 

But $188.24 billion of that Q2-2026 number (that is, 45 percent of the $416.77 billion total) came from six data center kingpins:

• Amazon ($AMZN)

• Alphabet ($GOOG)

• Microsoft ($MSFT)

• Meta Platforms ($META)

• Oracle Corp. ($ORCL)

• Micron Technology ($MU)

If we exclude those six data center players, then capex spending didn’t jump 32.5 percent in Q2. It rose only 6.3 percent from the year-ago period, a far less impressive number. 

And who are these biggest spenders, you ask? We simply sorted our findings from largest to smallest, and answered the question instantly. See Figure 2, below.

Wow. No hyperscaler even cracked the Top 5 this quarter. And the first non-hyperscalers that do make an appearance are global behemoths such as Walmart ($WMT), Tesla ($TSLA) and AT&T ($T). Of course those folks would be near the top somewhere.

This also raises another question. If the AI hyperscalers are skewing the total picture on capex spending, are they doing the same on other financial statement items too? We’ve noted previously that Google, for example, booked a $97.8 billion one-time gain on the value of SpaceX ($SPCX) shares that it owns, which inflated overall net income growth considerably this quarter. 

So what other outlier events are exerting a larger gravitational effect on corporate performance, and to what extent? Stay tuned for more analysis in future posts!