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Comment by gavinray | Hacker News Reader

Hot diggity, I don't know anything about money, but if you look at "free cash flow" at the end:

  > FREE CASH FLOW
  >
  > 3MO 2022         3MO 2021       9MO 2022      9MO 2021
  >
  > $            173 $        9,547 $      13,151 $      25,876

Does this mean they went from 13k * 1M to 173M in free cash in the last year?

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FCF isn't a great metric for tech companies due to how many shares they issue through employee comp. FCF calculation typically doesn't include this cost.

But yeah, it's down bigly. So is their net income.

Are you sure that's how to interpret it?

The way I see it is:

- From Jul - Sep 2022, the net cash provided by operating activities minus their purchases left them with $173M.

- From Jan - Sep 2022, the net cash provided by operating activities minus their purchases left them with $13,151M.

So yes, this quarter wasn't great as they only had $173M cash leftover. But their previous two quarters were good enough to leave them with $13,151M - $173M = $12,978M free cash flow.

It's just that in Q3 they only produced $173M free cash flow. They still have $13,151M free cash flow produced since Jan 2022.

Yep, seems to be driven by 9.3B in purchases of property, plant and equipment in Q3 22 (up +116% from 4.3B in Q3 21). I think it's due to "investments in data centers, servers, and network infrastructure. An increase in AI capacity is driving substantially all of our capital expenditure growth in 2023."

Q2 report... June 30 was 4,450M

Q1 was 8,528

and 9 months ago it was 13,151

Now its 173.

Approximately 4,000 per quarter for the past 3 quarters..... Pretty crazy.

where did all of their free cash flow go?

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