Amazon just told Wall Street it will spend $200 billion in capex this year. Analysts expected $145 billion. That’s a $55 billion surprise, roughly $150 million per day more than the market had priced in. The stock dropping 15% makes sense on a surface level. EPS missed by two cents. Q1 operating income guidance came in below expectations. Fine. But zoom out and the math tells a different story. AWS grew 24%, its fastest rate in 13 quarters. AWS backlog hit $244 billion, up 40% year over year. Revenue beat expectations. Advertising beat expectations. The core business is accelerating. So why is the stock cratering? Because Amazon generated $139.5 billion in operating cash flow in 2025 and is about to plow nearly all of it back into infrastructure. Free cash flow collapsed 71% to $11.2 billion. Amazon is making more money than ever and returning almost none of it to shareholders. Here’s what the market is really pricing tonight. Google guided $175 to $185 billion in capex and investors gave it a pass because cloud revenue grew 48%. Meta guided $115 to $135 billion and got a pass because ad revenue keeps compounding. Amazon guided $200 billion and got punished because AWS grew “only” 24% while Google Cloud grew 48% and Azure grew 39%. Wall Street isn’t scared of AI spending anymore. They’re scoring each dollar of capex against each point of cloud growth. And by that math, Amazon is currently the worst value among the hyperscalers. Andy Jassy’s response on the call was telling. “This isn’t some quixotic top-line grab.” When a CEO has to explicitly deny that, you know exactly what the market is thinking. The four hyperscalers will collectively spend over $500 billion on infrastructure this year. Amazon is betting the largest share on a thesis that compute scarcity defines the next decade. If they’re right, today’s 15% drop is noise. If they’re wrong, they just lit $200 billion on fire while their competitors spent more efficiently.