Andy Jassy has done the best job to date in bringing some clarity to the basic economics of the AI infrastructure investment.

From AMZN's earnings call last night (7/30/26).

"Let me talk a little bit on how we see this investment playing out. Earlier this year we said we were going to invest approximately $200 Billion in cash capex in 2026. The majority of which to support AI and AWS. At this level of spend and higher, we have a clear line of sight to strong financial returns and I'll explain why. There are two major parts of the investment, the data centers, and the servers and networking equipment that go into them. These have different capital cycles. Data center capital is spent starting two years before we can put servers into them to start monetizing. Once a data center opens with servers plugged in, we start generating significant revenue right away and then get to monetize these data centers for 30+ years without having to spend that "start up" capital again. Servers and networking equipment operate on a shorter cycle. We typically purchase these a few months before putting them into service, so we have strong visibility into customer demand before we trigger the spend. If the demand isn't there, we won't spend the capital. For servers and networking equipment, on average, it takes a little less than 3 years to break even on that investment. The servers currently have a useful life of at least 5 to 6 years, and most of our AI capacity these days is being contracted for at least five-year terms. That means that we're driving significant free cash flow on the servers and networking equipment in the 2-3 years after we break even. It's also worth noting that AWS has a strong track record of pulling forward break evens on server equipment , where we've already made meaningful progress, and finding ways to extend the useful life of this equipment, without impacting the customer experience. So, for our data centers have 30-plus-year useful lives and we should get at least five to six generations of server economics like I explained earlier.”

events.q4inc.com: Events Platform - Q4

From Andy's comments, a reasonably skilled spreadsheet jockey can work out a range of estimates of ROIC for both the short lived (servers/networking)and long lived(data center shell)investments. Having arrived at those ROIC estimates, I believe the spreadsheet jockeys will be very impressed, which in turn should push hyperscaler stock price estimates upward. We may be seeing some of that price action today.

Sundar and Satya, are you listening?