# The Metric Taking Over Earning Season

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/thoughts-on-the-market-980853/the-metric-taking-over-earning-season
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/thoughts-on-the-market-980853/the-metric-taking-over-earning-season.md
Podcast: [Thoughts on the Market](https://stenobird.com/podcast/thoughts-on-the-market-980853)
Published: 2026-04-30T20:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/rss.art19.com/episodes/44f5cbdf-b360-4b34-8fbf-9c71083a9d72.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/rss.art19.com/episodes/44f5cbdf-b360-4b34-8fbf-9c71083a9d72.mp3?rss_browser=BAhJIg90cmFuc2NyaWJyBjoGRVQ%3D--952c5701c84ad333c69d5faa668f8177091704f0
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/thoughts-on-the-market-980853/episodes/the-metric-taking-over-earning-season
Duration seconds: 289

## Resource

Capital spending usually signals how a company is positioning itself for the future. Our Global Head of Fixed Income Research Andrew Sheets explains why this metric is getting more attention from investors. Read more  insights  from Morgan Stanley. ----- Transcript ----- Andrew Sheets:  Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Sheets, Global Head of Fixed Income Research at Morgan Stanley.  Today: Why capital expenditure is rapidly becoming one of the most important numbers in earning season across asset classes. It's Thursday, April 30th at 2pm in London.  This is a high-risk episode in the sense that it may already be obsolete by the time that you hear it. But then again, maybe that's fitting for a discussion of record capital spending on cutting edge technology. We are in the middle of the busiest part of earning season, and yesterday four of the largest companies in the world reported numbers. These companies – Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta – have a combined market cap of nearly $12 trillion.  Yet, while the focus of earning season is traditionally about earnings, another line item is rapidly rising in importance. Capital spending on AI infrastructure – the chips, power cooling, and connections that are required to build and run AI models is soaring. And the companies that reported yesterday are at the leading edge of this trend.  The first thing about all this spending is simply the scale. For this year alone, Morgan Stanley estimates that it will amount to over $600 billion across the largest U.S. hyperscalers. To put that in perspective, that means just a handful of U.S. tech companies are now set to spend almost as much on capital and equipment this year as every non-technology company in the S&P 500 did in 20…

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## Transcript

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