Amazon filed its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday 31 July, disclosing $650.0bn of total contractual commitments1. One line inside that table appeared in no earnings-call commentary: $137.2bn of leases not yet commenced, meaning buildings Amazon has signed for where the facility has not yet been delivered, overwhelmingly data-centre and power infrastructure. Unconditional purchase obligations, which the filing says include long-term energy procurement, add a further $130.1bn2.
Cash capital expenditure, the money actually spent on physical assets in the period, ran to $53.1bn in the quarter against $31.4bn a year earlier, a rise of 69 per cent, and $96.3bn across the first half3. Amazon raised full-year 2026 guidance to roughly $220bn, citing memory costs and continued cloud investment. That figure counts only the cash it expects to lay out this year.
Guidance and the lease line measure different things, and the gap between them is where the planning problem sits. A lease not yet commenced is a building somewhere that a landlord is contracted to deliver and Amazon is contracted to take, with a grid connection behind it that some system operator has to find. None of that shows up in the number quoted when a campus goes before a planning committee.
Virginia's regulator issued Amazon's Lake Anna cooling-water discharge permit on 21 July, assessed as one campus drawing on one river. The pipeline sitting in the 10-Q is a portfolio-scale commitment being permitted one site at a time, by bodies that see only the site in front of them.
