Silicon Valley’s expenses of Silicon Valley become Berserk while Microsoft is starting to cash in

Meta, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have all published quarterly profits this week, and there was a common thread attaching them together: a boom of IA expenses and plans to increase it even more, beyond the expectations of analysts.

Although capital expenses above expectations often do not tend to make investors particularly happy, it had roughly the opposite effect this week, especially for Meta and Microsoft, who both saw pop in their stock after the versions.

And for Microsoft, who published his Forecasts for the most important capital expenses of all timeThe boost of the shares led the technology giant to become the second company to reach a market assessment of $ 4 billions, when it briefly violated the threshold on Thursday.

This decision was largely because Meta and Microsoft finally had the income to show their investments.

Meta’s advertising revenues, which is a huge money manufacturer for the technology giant, for the last quarter, came in a few billion dollars before Wall Street expectations, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg attributed this to the deployment of artificial intelligence in the advertising system. Zuckerberg continued to assure investors that this surprise increase in income should continue, saying that his Several billion dollars The investment in the creation of a team dedicated to the creation of an AI “Superintelligent” will result in even more gains for its advertising business.

Microsoft reported These sales increased by 18% compared to last year and that the income from its cloud computing platform Azure had exceeded $ 75 billion this exercise, up 34% compared to last year. Revenues from the company’s productivity and business processes have also exceeded expectations, and business managers have shared that business software sales have been partly stimulated thanks to a generalized adoption of its Microsoft 365 AI product.

Do all the new combined remind me of a question: Does the bet Ai de la Silicon Valley finally start to bear fruit?

The Boom of IA expenses

Meta was in the mid -dollars AI afterwards after Zuckerberg admitted that the company had lagged behind the competitors in the AI race. The push was marked by hiring of high -level strategic talents, and in particular the poaching Openai employees attempted by multi -year offers worth millions of dollars.

In the meantime, the company also presents itself to data centers. Last month, Zuckerberg said Meta would invest Hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers. The first of the multiple multi-cligawatt data centers on the company must be unveiled next year, and Zuckerberg said in an article on his Threads Counts that one of these data centers “covers a significant part of the Manhattan imprint”.

This week, Meta said that she expected to pay between $ 66 billion and $ 72 billion this year, and that she expects to spend even more next year for data centers and hiring.

Microsoft, on the other hand, said that he expected to spend more than $ 100 billion next year, with a large part of the AI. This upcoming next quarter, the company is considering 30 billion dollars in capital expenses, again mainly for AI, in what is a record forecast for the company.

Apple also displayed better than expected income on its report on the results this week, but this was mainly attributable to iPhone sales. Despite this, CEO Tim Cook told investors when calling the company’s profits that the technology giant provided “significantly»Increase their investments in AI to make up for its competitors and was open to acquisitions to do so.

Is AI’s request ultimately caught up?

One of the biggest concerns about AI concerns expenses. Even if the Silicon Valley pays countless dollars – more than $ 300 billion this year, according to the numbers of Financial time– Not everyone believes that AI demand will not develop accordingly. And if this is not the case, it would lead to a major problem in the industry.

In a paper Published earlier last month, the federal reserve said that the biggest challenge with a generative AI was not the potential of technology itself, but rather to bring people and businesses to use it. Technology is not necessarily largely adopted outside the fields of technology, science and finance, and is mainly deployed by large companies.

As technology improves, AI demand is required to increase also, but by what is a mystery. If this request does not develop as planned, warns the Fed document, this could have “disastrous consequences”, as is the rail overexpansion of the 1800s and the economic depression that followed.

The answer to the question of whether the request for AI will increase or not to the level of investment is still not a yes or a non -final non -, but this series of income has given a substantial dose of hope to AI bulls.

But the risk of spending on sur-Trop is still there, because the technology giants continue to make record investment commitments: if the increase in investments is not followed by a tangible increase in demand and income, in particular for the main companies of the companies, then the possibility of “disastrous consequences” is still there.