Big Tech Earnings Wrap: Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft

📱Feed full of ads… Marketing teams are workin’ overtime. Meta shares spiked 14% yesterday after the Instagram parent tripled its profit and introduced its first dividend. All of Meta's social apps saw a boost in ad impressions and price per ad as it incorporated more AI into its algos for better #targeting. Revenue grew 25%. Ad rival Alphabet notched record quarterly sales and profit, but its stock fell after Google Search and YouTube ad sales weren’t as spicy as expected. Up next week: Snap and Pinterest.

☁️ AI in the sky… AI investments are powering a cloud boom. Microsoft notched record sales for the fifth straight quarter, as AI mania attracted thousands of new Azure customers last year. Its cloud biz, the world’s third largest, grew 20%. Now it’s focused on “infusing AI across every layer” of its tech stack. Google’s cloud revenue grew 25% as it enters its “Gemini era” (its new AI model). Amazon’s AWS (the largest cloud provider) saw 13% revenue growth, meeting expectations.

👾 Logged in… Gaming, hardware, and ecomm were also standouts. Gaming’s now Microsoft’s third-biggest biz after its Activision acquisition helped boost gaming revenue by 49% (shoutout CoD). But PC and other device sales are expected to stay in the “low double digits.” Apple reported its first quarterly revenue growth in a year. But the stock fell after the iDevice maker announced a 13% decline in China (and hinted at weak iPhone sales ahead). Amazon had expectation-beating 14% revenue growth after a record-breaking holiday-shopping szn.

Lookin’ forward → Big tech is soaring again as the AI revolution supercharges results. Meanwhile, tech’s “year of efficiency” (coined by Meta) has boosted profits, and the cost cuts are still going — tech layoffs this year have topped 30K. But more regulatory hurdles could be coming: last week the FTC ordered five tech biggies (including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google) to give more deets on their AI + cloud partnerships.