Capital Reactor

The Energy Economy of AI Infrastructure

This visualizer maps the financial state of the world's largest AI companies as a thermodynamic system — because money moves through a tech company the same way energy moves through a machine. Fuel in. Work done. Heat lost. Stress accumulated.

Revenue
Fuel input — the raw energy entering the system each year.
CapEx
Stored charge — energy locked into datacentres, chips, and cable.
Free Cash Flow
Escaping heat — what survives the machine and reaches shareholders.
Entropy
System stress — a synthetic index of CapEx pressure, debt load, and cash-flow strain.

Each company is a reactor: fuel flows in through the top, infrastructure charge accumulates in the core, and free cash radiates outward as heat. As entropy climbs, the machine glows hotter and the boundaries begin to blur — a sign the system is running near its thermal limit.

Scrub the timeline or hit Play to watch any company's machine evolve from 2015 to 2026. Add any ticker to compare. Key AI inflection points are marked along the way.

How entropy is calculated
+0.42 CapEx / OpCF infrastructure burden
+0.30 Debt / (OpCF × 3) debt load vs. 3-yr payoff
+0.28 1 − FCF / OpCF cash-flow squeeze
−0.18 Warchest / (OpCF × 2) cash reserves buffer stress
+0.08 −ΔWarchest / OpCF actively depleting reserves

All terms normalised to each company's own historical peak. Score of 1.0 = worst the company has ever looked on this index.

2015 2026 Jan 2015