Whoa, the rolling free cash flow of U.S. tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle is expected to hit a historic peak of around $250 billion in 2024, but starting from Q4 2025, it’s projected to experience a cliff-like decline. This trend marks a reversal of the past decade’s era where the tech industry consistently reaped excess profits through a 'light asset' model. Massive AI capital expenditures (CapEx) are rapidly eating into the core cash reserves of these companies. Among them, Meta’s capital allocation strategy is the most aggressive. According to its disclosed data, Meta has raised its 2026 CapEx guidance to $125–145 billion, nearly doubling from $72.2 billion in 2025. Due to the ongoing high-intensity construction of data centers and compute power procurement, Meta is facing the prospect of negative free cash flow in 2027 and 2028. At the same time, the cash flow dynamics across the entire tech supply chain are showing extreme imbalances: While the super buyers are seeing cash flow declines due to infrastructure investments, compute power suppliers like NVIDIA are the direct beneficiaries, with their quarterly revenue soaring to $81.6 billion and gross margins holding steady at a high 75%. This structural transformation is disrupting the liquidity support mechanism that has long existed in U.S. equities. In the past, massive free cash flows were primarily used for stock buybacks, directly supporting the performance of the S&P 500 index. As this excess cash flow is redirected toward costly physical infrastructure, the public market has lost its largest routine buyer. This shift toward a 're-industrialization' model means that big tech companies are betting on the certainty of financial outflows to gamble on the uncertainty of software returns.