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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, February 17th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal.

The AI boom has seen a surge in capital spending for things like new gigantic data centers,

and that rapid growth is making it harder to analyze major tech companies' earnings.

Then, a leading expert on the intersection of technology and work shares his perspective

on how AI is reshaping the labor market. But first, five major tech companies, alphabet,

Amazon, meta, Microsoft, and Oracle are expected to spend a combined total of $3 trillion

on property and equipment in the next four years. But the results won't just be new data

centers. We'll also see depreciation expenses soaring. Yet, investors can't find those expenses

listed on the income statements of big tech companies,

nor is there any consistency in how to report these costs.

That's according to Jonathan Weil, who covers finance for their journals heard on the street column.

He's with me now.

Jonathan, can you just briefly tell us what are depreciation expenses for people who might not know?

Depreciation is the

expense the company's report as part of their earnings when they go out and build huge plants

...