Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft: What Four Earnings Reports Could Tell Us About AI's ROI

Four of the world's most valuable companies will release their first-quarter 2026 earnings results today. Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon collectively committed somewhere between $600 billion and US$645 billion in capital expenditure for 2026. Tonight is the first real accounting of whether those bets are paying off.

Here is what we expect the earnings reports to look like

1. Alphabet

Alphabet earnings report will be the one to watch out for and it also comes with the most to lose. Google Search posted its fastest quarterly growth since 2022 in Q4 2025, and any deceleration tonight will reignite concerns.

Analysts expect Alphabet to report roughly $92.2 billion in revenue, representing year-on-year growth of around 20 percent. The more important figure will be Google Cloud, which closed Q4 2025 with a backlog exceeding $240 billion and operating margins that nearly doubled year on year. Watch for any revision to the $175–US$185 billion capex guidance, a figure that already exceeds the company's 2025 operating cash flow.

2. Meta

Meta's advertising engine has been relentless, but investors are increasingly focused on what the growth is costing. Wall Street expects around $55.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, implying roughly 31 percent year-on-year growth.

The harder question is margin. Meta's 2026 capex guidance of $115–$135 billion represents a near-doubling of 2025 spending, the steepest proportional step-up among the four companies. AI-generated video ad tools were already running at a $10 billion annual rate at year-end. If that figure has moved materially, it would go a long way toward justifying the outlay. Reality Labs losses, which management guided toward the $19 billion level seen in 2025, deserve close scrutiny.

3. Microsoft

Microsoft carries a commercial backlog of $625 billion, but around 45 percent of that figure is tied to OpenAI – a concentration that clouds the underlying picture. The non-OpenAI portion, roughly $350 billion, grew 28 percent year on year at the last count and remains the more instructive signal of genuine enterprise demand.

CFO Amy Hood has previously noted that Azure's growth would have exceeded 40 percent had incoming GPU supply been allocated there rather than diverted to first-party products like Microsoft 365 Copilot.

4. Amazon

AWS delivered its fastest growth in 13 quarters at the end of 2025, and analysts are expecting revenue of around $177 billion for the quarter, with AWS and advertising once again doing the heavy lifting.

The pressure point remains free cash flow, which compressed sharply to $11.2 billion on a trailing-12-month basis from $38.2 billion the prior year, weighed down by a $50 billion surge in property and equipment spending. CEO Andy Jassy has committed approximately $200 billion in capex for 2026. Investors need to see either a trough or a credible timeline for one. Without it, the AWS growth story gets harder to hold.