Operating cash flow less capital expenditure. Chapter 10.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 10 — The Lender’s Decision
Who is lending the money and who bears the loss: the bonds, leases and guarantees behind the largest campuses, and how the paper reaches ordinary retirement accounts.
Also discussed in
Sources that use it
- Oracle Corporation, “Oracle Announces Q1 Results Driven by Triple Digit Growth in Cloud Infrastructure Revenues,” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1, filed 10 September 2026, for the quarter ended 31 August 2026 (“a record Q1 operating cash flow of $23 billion, up 184%. Free cash flow was negative $5 billion for Q1”; the cash-flow statement gives “Net cash provided by operating activities” of 23,103 against “Capital expenditures” of 28,499, in millions of dollars, and the free-cash-flow table a negative figure in every quarter of fiscal 2026; the release subtracts customers’ prepayments of 11,363 from the capital expenditures for a non-GAAP net cash outlay of 17,966) In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Free cash flow.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/free-cash-flow (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-free-cash-flow-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Free cash flow}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/free-cash-flow},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}