Big Tech earnings test record stock market rally as AI spending takes center stage

Artificial intelligenceBig Tech earnings test record stock market rally as AI spending takes center stageAlphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft reported quarterly earnings, offering some sense of how the market is. Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00The Meta store in Burlingame, Calif., on Sunday.Benjamin Fanjoy / Bloomberg via Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleApril 29, 2026, 5:23 PM EDTBy Rob WileMarket watchers looking for clarity about the direction of Big Tech and the AI investment boom didn’t get much Wednesday afternoon amid a barrage of key earning reports.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.Instead, four leading tech companies reported quarterly results that beat Wall Street’s official forecasts but nevertheless fell short of the sky-high expectations investors have set for companies leading the AI revolution. Investors were most enthusiastic about the results of Google parent Alphabet, whose shares climbed as much as 6% in after-hours trading. The company reported earnings and revenue that beat analysts’ expectations and raised its estimate of how much it would spend on AI infrastructure. Earnings for Facebook parent Meta were greeted with less fervor. Its shares fell more than 5% after it said it expected revenue growth to stay flat in the second quarter. Amazon’s and Microsoft’s results and forecasts were more mixed. Investors ultimately sent both lower by about 3%. The major U.S. stock indexes are sitting near all-time highs despite war with Iran, rising oil prices and dismal consumer sentiment readings. But overall business investment and consumer spending levels remain resilient — and companies on the S&P 500, the index considered the best proxy for overall stock market performance, are reporting the highest average net profit margins in more than 15 years, according to the analytics group FactSet. That performance is being led by tech companies known as “The Magnifice...