Big Tech Heads Into Earnings Season With AI Spending Under the Microscope

The world's biggest technology companies are heading into their mid-year earnings season with one question towering over all others: is the staggering sum being spent on artificial intelligence starting to pay off?

The scale of the spending is without precedent. Meta has signalled full-year capital expenditure of $115 billion to $135 billion — figures once associated with national budgets, not corporate infrastructure — as it races to build the data centres and computing power that AI development demands. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia face similar scrutiny of their own vast outlays, with investors parsing every update for evidence that AI investment is translating into revenue rather than merely burning cash.

The market's judgment so far has been broadly favourable but increasingly selective. Meta trades around $659, below its all-time high but with analysts maintaining bullish targets north of $850. Apple sits near $273, within reach of its 52-week high, buoyed by expectations for its AI-infused product cycle and the foldable iPhone due this fall.

Tesla enters the season with the most to prove. The company's automotive deliveries fell 8.6 percent in 2025 to 1.64 million vehicles, and investors want updated guidance on both the core car business and the energy division — as well as evidence that the robotaxi programme, still tiny relative to its promise, can scale into the growth engine the company's valuation assumes.

Earnings season is always a report card; this one is closer to a referendum. The AI boom has carried equity markets and justified trillions in valuation on the promise of transformation. Each quarterly report is now a data point in the biggest question in business: whether that promise is being kept on schedule.