Hi! And the Oscar goes via… JFK International. The Academy Award won by Pavel Talankin for “Mr Nobody Against Putin” — which went missing on Wednesday after the filmmaker was made to check in the 8.5 lb statuette at a New York airport — has now been found. Today we’re exploring:

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MAMA, I just spent $700 billion

Big tech has been splurging on data centers, servers, and more for some time now. But, after the latest host of big-tech earnings, we are starting to reach almost comical levels of money. This week, a subset of the BATMMAAN group, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon (or MAMA), all reported earnings — and three of four boosted their capex budgets for 2026. 

Proportionally, it was Meta that increased its capex the most, increasing guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up about 8% from its previous forecast. There were smaller bumps from Microsoft and Alphabet, while Amazon remained the lone outlier that didn’t boost its own spending plans… perhaps because it’s already at a gargantuan ~$200 billion.

Collectively, those four companies are planning to spend roughly $700 billion on capex in the coming year as they continue to build out the infrastructure to support their AI ambitions.

However, investors have reacted very differently to Big Tech’s spending strategy: Alphabet was up 10% on Thursday, whilst Meta dipped some 9%. The crucial differentiator seems to be not what they are spending, but how they are planning to use that giant sum. 

Google is not only making high-end tensor processing unit AI chips for internal use, but it also confirmed that it will begin delivering those chips to other companies this year — and Meta is reportedly already among its customers. In other words, Google is positioning itself to profit from the broader AI ecosystem. Meta, meanwhile, is building inference-optimized chips primarily to lower its own costs. 

As Meta remains largely a renter of infrastructure, Google is becoming a landlord. Nowhere is that clearer than in Google Cloud, where revenue grew 63% to over $20 billion last quarter, providing a massive engine to offset its infrastructure bills.

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US jobless claims have sunk to the lowest level in more than 50 years

New data released by the Labor Department on Thursday reveals that the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits has fallen to its lowest level in almost six decades.

According to the filing, initial jobless claims dropped to 189,000 in the week ended April 25 — down by 26,000 from the week prior, and below Bloomberg analysts’ estimates of 212,000 — marking the fewest new applications since September 1969, The Associated Press reported. 

Continuing claims, related to the number of people who’ve already filed an initial claim and continued to claim unemployment benefits for that week, also fell in the week ended April 18, hitting ~1.8 million, the lowest level seen in two years.

These unemployment claim figures, supported by the latest job turnover data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, indicate that the US labor market continues to be in a “low-hire, low-fire” state. For the month of February, total non-farm hiring was over 4.8 million, a 9% decline from January, while separations sunk to 4.97 million.

Cutting losses

What does this mean for workers? Although historically low separation rates are good news for those who are already holding down jobs — provided that they’re content with staying put — the hiring slowdown that’s been observed in recent years appears to be tapering off further as more companies turn to AI, the job threat du jour, to cover taskwork.

According to Bloomberg Economics, the decline in unemployment claims “sends a strong signal that layoffs are still limited.” But that's something of a narrative violation for those keeping track of job cut announcements sweeping the tech world and beyond, which could take full effect later in the year.

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A broader lens for today’s technology

When it comes to tech investing, many investors aren’t seeing the full picture. Sector silos and reliance on exchange-specific benchmarks create a narrow lens that can overlook the far-reaching impact of tech-enabled growth. 

The NYSE^® 100 Index takes a different approach, expanding the addressable universe worth around double¹ the market cap of other exchanges used by tech companies.

Now, investors can seek to track its performance with the Global X NYSE® 100 ETF (NYSX)^® 100 ETF (NYSX): 100 companies driving technology-enabled growth. As a rules-based fund drawing from all major U.S. exchanges, NYSX provides exposure to companies based on what they do, rather than where they trade. 

The fund brings together companies involved in innovation in sectors like cloud computing, mobile payments, and e-commerce — tracking companies that leverage technology across their respective industries. 

Reconstituted quarterly in line with the NYSE^® 100 Index, NYSX may provide exposure that reflects new listings and evolving market trends over time. 

The number of people using Meta apps just fell for the first time in seven years

In more bad news for Meta, the number of total daily users across its core business — messaging, watching, liking, and doomscrolling its apps — fell for the first time since it started breaking out the metric seven years ago.

What’s appening?

According to Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday’s earnings call, the number of “total family dailies,” or basically anyone who’s registered and logged in across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and (we guess) Threads, slipped from the end of last year. Meta’s CEO laid the blame on internet outages in Iran and blocks in Russia, insisting that, otherwise, “trends across our apps are strong.”

Geopolitical complications aside, the drop still marked the social media giant’s first quarterly decline since it started breaking out the top-line metric in 2019, wiping 20 million daily users from its still staggering 3.5 billion+ tally.

While some mild skepticism around Meta’s reasoning for the slipping figure has cropped up, and yet more persists around its reasoning for bundling its app user metrics together, the decline is a drop in the ocean for its mega family of apps, having grown its daily active people base from 2.1 billion at the start of 2019 to 3.56 billion at the end of Q1.

It also didn't stop the company from managing to monetize those eyeballs to an insane level, raking in a staggering $55 billion in advertising revenue across the first quarter, up 33% from a year earlier.

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Innovation isn’t limited to a single exchange. Your investments shouldn’t be either. NYSX from Global X tracks the NYSE^® 100 Index, a rules-based benchmark that selects stocks across all major U.S. exchanges. Explore how NYSX taps into tech.

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Off the charts: What is America’s favorite planet, according to a new YouGov survey? (Before you say it, Pluto is indeed included as a planet in the survey.) [Answer below]. 

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1  Source: Morningstar Direct as of 3/31/26.