thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Cloud Computing · Foundational

Capital Expenditure (CapEx)

Up-front spending on physical assets such as servers and data centers, depreciated over their useful life.

Definition

CapEx is money spent to acquire or upgrade long-lived assets. Traditional on-premises IT requires large CapEx for hardware and facilities, which must be forecast years in advance; cloud adoption largely converts this into operational expenditure.

Example

Buying $500,000 of storage arrays expected to last five years is CapEx.

Exam tip

Moving to the cloud shifts costs from CapEx to OpEx; this is one of the most frequently tested cloud economics facts.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms