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Big Tech firms beat earnings expectations amid AI spending questions

Apr 29, 2026, 6:38pm EDT
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A technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data center
Reuters/Noah Berger for AWS

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all beat first-quarter earnings expectations on Wednesday, but investors are poised to closely scrutinize their heavy spending on AI.

Big Tech has propped up the US stock market — and in many ways, the US economy writ large — in the last year, but investors have grown anxious over whether the companies can justify their sky-high expenditures.

A report this week on OpenAI’s missed revenue and user targets added to the jitters.

Meta’s stock fell in after-hours trading Wednesday after it announced plans to put more capital toward AI.

The other three Big Tech firms reported strong cloud computing growth.

Stock chart for Alphabet Amazon Meta Microsoft
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