This week, five companies with a combined market value north of $14 trillion reported earnings within 24 hours of each other.
Every single one beat Wall Street's expectations on revenue...
Every single one beat on profit...
Yet three of them were down.
That tells you something about where we are right now.
Topline growth and even bottom line growth isn’t enough… Wall Street is growing increasingly impatient with CAPEX investments.
Those are two very different questions, and which side of the line a company sits on is what separated the winners from the losers this week.
Google (Alphabet): $109.9B revenue, up 22%
This was the cleanest print of the week.
Revenue of $109.9 billion, up 22% year-on-year.
Operating margin expanded to 36.1%.
But the number everyone should be paying attention to is Google Cloud.
Cloud revenue hit $20 billion for the first time ever, up 63% in a year. More importantly, the profit on that cloud revenue tripled and backlog doubled
Google is spending $180-190 billion on infrastructure this year, and the market is fine with it because the returns are already showing up. So this is what AI CAPEX paying off looks like.
Microsoft (MSFT): $81.3B revenue, up 17%
Solid quarter on the surface. Azure — their cloud computing business — grew 40%, ahead of expectations. Commercial bookings, meaning new contracts signed, were up 112%.
The concern is what management said alongside those numbers… they can't build data centres fast enough to meet demand.
Supply constraints will last at least through mid-2026… meaning that Azure is leaving revenue on the table right now, because the physical infrastructure doesn't exist yet to serve them. Next quarter they're guiding for growth to slow slightly, from 40% to around 37%.
That moderation is what spooked people and of the 5 reports… I’d say Microsoft’s was the weakest
Meta (META): $56.3B revenue, up 33%
The fastest revenue growth Meta has seen since 2021. Operating margin of 41%, meaning for every dollar that came in, 41 cents was profit.
Clearly the AI advertising engine is working, and working well.
The stock dropped 9% after hours anyway.
Why? Because Meta also announced they're raising their 2026 CAPEX budget by $10 billion, to somewhere between $125 and $145 billion.
On top of that, Reality Labs lost another $4 billion on just $402 million of revenue.
The bull case is simple - a 33% revenue jump shows the AI spend is already generating returns, even if indirectly. The bear case is equally simple - the returns are buried inside better ad targeting, not a direct revenue line you can point to and say a $145 billion CAPEX bill produced that.
Markets prefer the latter. I’m not worried though.
Amazon (AMZN): $181.5B revenue, up 17%
AWS, Amazon's cloud business, is now running at an annualised revenue rate of $150 billion, with AI alone contributing more than $15 billion of that on an annualised basis. The order backlog sits at $364 billion.
Dominant by any measure
The headlines were all about free cash flow collpasing 95% year-on-year to $1.2 billion. Mainly because Amazon spent $43.2 billion on capital expenditure in a just 3 months.
But here’s what a lot of people are missing…
CEO Andy Jassy compared it to the early days of AWS itself, when they spent heavily upfront and generated enormous returns later. That may well be right.
Amazon has largely been left behind in the AI boom… but I’m quietly confident. All eyes on AWS revenue growth in the short term though.
Apple (AAPL): $111.2B revenue, up 17%
Apple's best March quarter in company history. iPhone revenue of $57 billion, up 22%.
Service revenue (so subscriptions, App Store and Apple Pay) — hit $31 billion, another all-time record.
Tim Cook noted that iPhone 17 demand is outstripping supply because of constraints in advanced semiconductor components, meaning the actual demand picture is even stronger than the revenue line shows.
The forward risks are real though.
The CFO flagged that memory costs — the chips that make devices run — will meaningfully hit profit margins in the June quarter, guiding down to 47.5-48.5%.
Side note: This is so bullish for the memory trio (SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron)
And the elephant in the room is Tim Cook handing the CEO role to hardware chief John Ternus. He made made his first earnings call appearance this week and said some platitudes without any specifics.
Basically no CAPEX for Apple though (well, 90% less than Amazon)… so it’s still tough to figure out where their growth engines come from.
Ultimately though this is still a question of CAPEX…
The companies that are getting rewarded are the ones where that spending is visibly, measurably turning into profit. Google is the clearest example this week.
The ones getting punished are those where the spending is ballooning faster than investors can see the return.
Amazon and Meta took the hit this round… but I’m still bullish on both.
What I'm watching is whether Microsoft gets the data centres built fast enough to accelerate Azure back above 40%, and whether Amazon's AWS revenue ramp starts to visibly outrun the capex curve in the next two quarters.
Those are the two threads that'll define the second half of 2026 for big tech investors.
Oliver