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Clear your schedule on Wednesday afternoon. Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Tesla are each reporting their December-quarter earnings after the market closes that day. Tesla is its own thing—we have a sense of what’s coming because it already released vehicle delivery numbers, signaling that revenue will drop. But Microsoft and Meta will be important to track, as their results should give us an update on AI development spending and—at least in Microsoft’s case—how much AI services are lifting revenue (or not).
Apple, meanwhile, reports its quarterly update on Thursday, although its results will be more an update about iPhone sales than anything else. Given how popular the iPhone 17 series seems to be, those results should be upbeat. Indeed, analysts are expecting Apple to post its strongest revenue growth in four years.
Of the four big tech earnings reports this week, though, Meta’s seems the most likely to move the stock meaningfully. The Facebook owner’s third-quarter report last October, in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his plans to bet even more billions on AI, sent Meta’s stock plunging 20% over a couple of weeks. While it has since recovered a bit, it’s still 12% below its level immediately before that earnings report. Zuckerberg’s willingness to spend like a drunken sailor on AI, with no clear plan for making a return on the investment, has proved too much for Wall Street. It wouldn’t be a shock if he presented a more disciplined message on Wednesday in giving the 2026 outlook for spending, hoping to win back some of the investor goodwill he has lost.
Whether that will work is hard to say. Zuckerberg’s recent statement that Meta “is planning to build tens of gigawatts this decade, and hundreds of gigawatts or more over time” of AI computing capacity should send chills down the spines of investors. It currently costs around $50 billion to build a 1 GW facility, so hundreds of gigawatts would cost trillions (for details, see here). Meta would rely on outside financing to pay for most of that, as it has already started to do. Still, given that ambition, what could Zuckerberg say to reassure investors about his spending plans? (For more on Meta’s AI infrastructure plans, see our updated org chart story published on Friday.)
Microsoft’s report, on the other hand, will be more nuanced, if only because the software and cloud giant’s financial reports are a model of opacity. We’ll be looking for any indicators showing whether Microsoft is increasing its software revenue by adding AI features to products (or introducing entirely new products, like Copilot). The risk facing Microsoft is that AI spending may not grow meaningfully or, even worse, the company may lose some of its enterprise software business to the myriad other suppliers of AI-powered software. On this topic, our recent deep dive into CEO Satya Nadella’s focus is worth reading.
It will take a few years for things to play out, but each quarter provides some updates. Already demand for AI cloud services has accelerated revenue growth for Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure. That business’s ability to grow seems constrained only by capacity, an issue everyone faces.
Here’s what analysts are expecting from each of the companies, courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Meta (Wednesday)
Revenue: $58.4 billion +20.7%
Earnings per share: $8.21 +2.4%
Microsoft (Wednesday)
Revenue: $80.278 billion +15.3%
EPS: $3.85 +19%
Tesla (Wednesday)
Revenue: $24.75 billion -3.7%
EPS: 35 cents -47%
Apple (Thursday)
Revenue: $138.469 billion +11.4%
EPS: $2.67 +11.3%
Friday on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which we talk with the CEO of newly public BitGo about what the initial public offering of the future could look like.
In Other News
• The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into allegations that payroll startup Deel recruited and paid a spy inside a Rippling office in Ireland, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Amazon will begin a round of layoffs next week, which could affect thousands of corporate employees, Reuters reported. In October, Amazon announced it was laying off 14,000 employees to reduce management layers and bureaucracy.
• Google has acquired Common Sense Machines, a Cambridge, Mass.,-based startup developing generative artificial intelligence models to create three-dimensional assets from two-dimensional images, a Google spokesperson confirmed. More here.
• Fervo Energy, a startup developing geothermal power projects, filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, Axios reported.
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