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Heavy capital spending relative to revenue will lead to declining, and in some cases negative, free cash flow and will hurt leverage ratios, to the extent these expenditures are debt-financed.
Forward, conditional call, now partly observable. Free cash flow has turned down across the group — Alphabet negative $5.855 billion in Q2 2026, Meta down to $784 million, Amazon's trailing-twelve-month at $1.2 billion — and the debt limb has begun at Meta, whose long-term debt rose to $83.664 billion in six months as cash flow collapsed. But leverage has not yet deteriorated on Moody's measure and no rating action has followed. Resolves on fiscal-2026 and 2027 filings.