It’s shaping up to be an interesting earnings season for the big tech stocks. Alphabet set the tone on July 22 with a solid second-quarter earnings report that saw revenue jump 24% from a year ago to $119.76 billion. Growth in Google Cloud was even better at 82%.
One might think that investors would celebrate Alphabet’s commitment to grow out its all-important artificial intelligence infrastructure, but you’d be wrong. Alphabet raised its capex guidance from $185 billion to $200 billion , and the stock promptly dropped 6%, taking several other major tech stocks with it, as investors are getting spooked by the amount of money being poured into AI right now.
It’s against this backdrop that fellow Magnificent Seven member Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) prepares to report its quarterly earnings after the closing bell on July 29. Meta, like Alphabet, has been spending heavily on data centers. But unlike Alphabet, it doesn’t have a cloud computing division of its own to sell AI computing capacity as a revenue stream.
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