Alphabet、Meta 於 2026 年首九個月股票回購額為 $0：作者查閲五家 AI 支出大戶的 10-Q 追蹤資金去向

Last week's selloff in Alphabet, Meta and Amazon was mostly told as a free cash flow story. I wanted to see the other side of the same cash flow statement: what happened to buybacks. So I read the latest 10-Q from each of the five big AI spenders and pulled the repurchase lines.

The short version: Alphabet and Meta, which bought back $62.2B and $30.1B of their own stock in 2024, repurchased nothing at all in the first nine months of 2026.

The table

Company	Period	Buybacks this year	Same period a year earlier	Authorization left	Capex this year	Capex a year earlier
Alphabet	Jan to Sep 2026	$0	$39.8B	$69.5B of $70.0B	$132.0B	$63.6B
Meta	Jan to Sep 2026	$0	$26.2B	$25.0B	$83.1B	$48.3B
Microsoft	Jul to Sep 2026	$2.9B	$4.0B	$37.7B of $60.0B	$39.4B	$19.4B
Amazon	Jan to Sep 2026	$0	$0	$6.1B of $10.0B	$175.7B	$92.3B
Oracle	Jun to Aug 2026	$0	$93M	$6.3B	n/a	n/a

Capex here is the cash flow statement line ("purchases of property and equipment", "additions to property and equipment" at Microsoft). Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July and Oracle's in June, so their periods are single quarters. Microsoft's buyback figure is the repurchase program only; it excludes shares withheld for employee taxes.

What stands out

Alphabet switched the buyback off, it did not trim it. The 10-Q says it plainly: "In the three and nine months ended September 30, 2026, there were no repurchases of the company's Class A or Class C shares." The $70.0B authorization from April 2025 still has $69.5B left. Over the same nine months, capex roughly doubled, from $63.6B to $132.0B.

Meta is borrowing instead of buying. Meta "did not repurchase any shares of Class A common stock during the nine months ended September 30, 2026", against $26.2B a year earlier. Its largest financing inflow was $24.9B of net proceeds from notes sold in May 2026. Capex rose from $48.3B to $83.1B.

Microsoft is the only one still buying, and at a slower pace. It repurchased 6 million shares for $2.9B in the September quarter, down from 8 million shares for $4.0B a year earlier, while quarterly capex doubled to $39.4B.

Amazon never relied on buybacks, so its story is the capex line alone: $175.7B in nine months, against $92.3B a year earlier. On Amazon's own definition, trailing twelve month free cash flow went from $14.8B to negative $42.4B.

Oracle's program is idle too: no repurchases in the quarter ended August 31, 2026, against $93M a year earlier.

Put together, Alphabet and Meta went from $66.1B of buybacks in the first nine months of 2025 to zero in the same months of 2026, while Alphabet, Meta and Amazon together spent $390.7B on capex, 1.9 times the $204.2B of a year earlier.

Why it matters for anyone screening stocks

Buybacks were a steady bid under Alphabet and Meta for years. A company that stops buying is not a sign of trouble on its own, and both authorizations are still open, so either can restart at any time. But it does change who is buying the stock on a bad day, which is worth keeping in mind when reading this season's post-earnings moves.

It also shows why I like reading the filing instead of a headline number. "Negative free cash flow" sounds the same for all five companies, but the 10-Qs show five different funding choices: stop buybacks, issue notes, keep buying, never buy, or pause.

How I pulled it

Every number above comes from the companies' own 10-Q filings. I searched each filing for "repurchase" and for the capex line, then read the cash flow statement and the stockholders' equity note. If you want to check a line yourself, these are the filings:

I did the searching through Equibles, which lets you search inside a single SEC filing and jump to the exact line, from the site or from ChatGPT and Claude.

Data: SEC filings, processed by Equibles.