Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Nvidia becomes the first $5 trillion market cap company…Anthropic finds AI models have ‘introspection,’ of a kind…and Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft tell investors just how much they’ve been spending on AI data centers.
Hello, it’s Jeremy here. I’m just back from Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh, where AI was very much a central feature in many of the discussions. I will provide a few insights from what I learned there.
Of course, there was a lot of discussion at the event about whether there’s an “AI bubble”—and that was before we got the latest earnings and cap ex numbers from Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet. Wall Street’s disparate reactions to the companies’ quarterly report cards show the market’s growing impatience to see tangible results from hefty AI investments. They will only support companies who can show they are seeing notable revenue impact today.
Why the market reacted so differently to Meta’s, Microsoft’s, and Alphabet’s capex numbers
Consider Alphabet, which saw its shares climb after its earnings report. With its quarterly search revenues growing 14.5% year-over-year, and cloud revenues up 32%, Alphabet continues to defy concerns that AI poses an existential innovator’s dilemma to its core advertising-based business model. By contrast, Meta said capital expenses on AI data centers next year would be even larger than the already whopping $70 billion to $72 billion it’s spending this year as CEO Mark Zuckerberg races to build “super-intelligence,” an incredibly ambitious effort with limited immediate revenue impact. Investors weren’t having it, and Meta’s shares got hammered, dropping 9% in pre-market trading.
Investor reaction to Microsoft’s earnings fell somewhere between these two extremes. Like Alphabet, it reported revenue numbers that exceeded consensus analyst forecasts, but not by much, and it also said capital expenditures would…