(Bloomberg) — A frenzied day of earnings reports offered a glimpse at how some of the world’s biggest tech companies are doing in artificial intelligence. The upshot: Alphabet Inc.’s Google is seeing a clear payoff from its AI spending, while Meta Platforms Inc. is lagging behind.
Most Read from Bloomberg
The two companies’ results were part of a flood of financial information Wednesday, when Alphabet, Meta, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all delivered their numbers within the span of two minutes. The four companies are the largest spenders on AI data farms, putting them at the center of an infrastructure build-out that’s expected to cost trillions of dollars.
Meta and Alphabet both tacked on another $10 billion to their budget — taking the quartet’s total, estimated spending to as much as $725 billion for 2026. A key question among investors and analysts now is whether that massive spending is providing tangible results.
On that front, Google was able to point to solid growth at its cloud computing unit, which recorded sales of $20 billion last quarter. That beat the $18.4 billion projection. The unit saw a “meaningful acceleration in growth,” driven by demand for its AI software and infrastructure, Google said.
“Our AI models have great momentum,” Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said during a conference call with analysts. “We are bringing helpful AI into the hands of billions of people every day through our products and platforms.”
Backlog — the measure of contracted work that hasn’t been recorded as revenue yet — nearly doubled from the prior quarter to over $460 billion. The period also was the strongest quarter yet for Google’s consumer AI services, including the Gemini app, Pichai said.
Alphabet shares gained 6.6% in late trading following the report, outshining the other AI giants. Futures on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index climbed 0.9%.
Meta had a harder time making its case to investors. Its shares tumbled more than 6% after the company boosted full-year capital expenditures to as much as $145 billion — an increase driven in part by rising component prices.
Meta isn’t alone in dialing up spending; Google and others also increased their targets. But Meta doesn’t have as much to show for this massive outlay. Unlike Google, it doesn’t sell cloud computing services, and its consumer AI app has been slower to take off.
