Big Tech Pulls Off a Very Big Earnings Week

Yahoo

02-08-2025

They're not called the Magnificent Seven for nothing.
This week brought big earnings reports for Big Tech, and the cohort didn't disappoint. On Wednesday, Meta and Microsoft obliterated Wall Street's expectations, followed by similarly strong showings for Amazon and Apple on Thursday. The reports made one thing clear: Big Tech's big AI bet is already paying off, which explains why it can't help but double down.
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Spare No Capital Expense
Let's start with the top-line figures: Each company beat Wall Street's revenue expectations for the quarter, with Amazon's $167 billion leading the group, followed by Apple's $94 billion, Microsoft's $76 billion, and Meta's measly $47.5 billion bringing up the rear. Profitability soared across the board, led by Meta's 36% year-over-year increase in net income. Microsoft, meanwhile, reported a group-leading net income north of $27 billion over the three months. In sum: Each company just executed a monster quarter, virtually anyway you slice it.
While certainly not surprising, it's likely more than enough to solidify their rock-solid standing as stock market cornerstones. Microsoft's market cap crept above $4 trillion on Thursday, putting it in league with Nvidia. Combined, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft account for a staggering 20% of the S&P 500 (Nvidia's about another 7%, while Alphabet's about 4%). The group's presence is looming so large that asset management group Research Affiliates chairman Rob Arnott told the Financial Times earlier this week that investors are pricing the companies 'as if they will have no competition in the future.'
When it comes to an ability to spend and invest money, these companies already have no competition. And, clearly, the juice has already been worth the squeeze:
Microsoft is planning a record $30 billion in capital spending in its current quarter (the first of its fiscal year 2026) to build out AI data centers. That's to power its Azure cloud business, now a major AI compute provider, which pulled in $75 billion in sales for all of the 2025 fiscal year. Translation: The company may be losing its grip on ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, but it's firmly entrenched in the AI ecosystem anyway.
One of those Azure clients? Meta, which raised the lower end of its 2025 capital spending forecast by $2 billion, to a range of $66 billion to $72 billion, to continue investing in AI. In the meantime, AI is helping Meta juice its ad sales, which still account for about 98% of the company's total revenue.
Amazon's capital expenditures already soared north of $30 billion this most recent quarter, coming in above projections.
(Apple) Core Business: Apple may well be the big winner of the week, by virtue of not being as big a loser as some feared. The company continues to fall behind in the AI race, recently losing a fourth key team member to Mark Zuckerberg's AI Superintelligence, and its longtime manufacturing presence in China puts it at the center of the trade war. But fears about that trade war spurred huge sales for its devices in the most recent quarter as customers looked to get ahead of tariffs. Now, those duties may never come. Apple's India plants have become the leading supplier of iPhones to the US, and while the White House has slapped most Indian exports with a 25% tariff, it appears smartphones and other electronic devices have scored an exemption.
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