"Super Thursday": Four Tech Titans Release Earnings Reports on the Same Day

Within a single day, Wall Street must digest the financial reports of four tech giants—this day is what the market refers to as "one of the most important earnings days in recent years."

On April 29th Eastern time (between the early morning and morning of April 30th Beijing time), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft will all release their quarterly performance after the market closes on the same trading day.

Matt Stucky, Chief Investment Portfolio Manager at Northwestern Mutual, characterized this day as "one of the most important earnings days in recent years." With a combined market value of approximately 11.6 trillion dollars, accounting for over 19% of the S&P 500 index, any fluctuation in the performance of these companies is more than enough to affect the overall market.

The S&P 500 index and the Nasdaq index have rebounded by about 11% and 18% respectively from their recent lows, as capital flows back into the technology and data center-related sectors. The core narrative behind this rebound is the sustained expansion of AI investment. The upcoming reports will be key to verifying whether this narrative can continue.

A $650 billion AI bill, the market wants to see returns

The combined capital expenditure budget for the four companies this year is a staggering 650 billion dollars: Google is projected to spend between 175 billion and 185 billion dollars, Meta between 115 billion and 135 billion dollars, Amazon approximately 200 billion dollars, and Microsoft's capital expenditure in the last quarter alone reached 37.5 billion dollars.

Money is still pouring in, but the market's patience is narrowing.

Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik wrote in last week's research report that the four hyperscale cloud vendors need to achieve three things simultaneously: deliver AI-driven revenue that exceeds expectations, maintain the capital expenditure budget without reduction, and demonstrate cost control through layoffs or pricing power. "Overall, the pattern entering the earnings season is quite clear and consistent."

Citizens analyst Andrew Boone told MarketWatch, "The entire AI ecosystem is currently constrained by supply"—"infrastructure and energy are insufficient to meet the demand for computing power. Therefore, all four companies must prove that they can put data center capacity into use and clear the backlog of orders quickly enough. "Part of the problem lies in who can execute well enough to truly realize capital expenditure on the ground.""

Signaling from the demand side remains strong. Boone noted that demand for computing power has been rapidly increasing since 2026: Anthropic signed a batch of new agreements to expand access to AI infrastructure; Amazon announced the provision of tens of millions of custom Graviton chips to Meta; Google disclosed at last week's Google Cloud Next conference that its models now process a daily amount of tokens that has increased from 10 billion in the last quarter to 16 billion.

Different pressures for each company, with Microsoft in the most delicate position

Google's pressure is mainly on the cost side. The company has previously indicated that depreciation rates will accelerate in the first quarter and will significantly increase throughout the year. The market's concern is not whether Google will continue to invest, but whether the cloud business and AI-related revenues can digest these expenditures more quickly.

Meta has the most direct proposition. It has the strongest advertising cash flow and the most aggressive investment in infrastructure. The company has clearly stated that the capital expenditure for 2026 will rise to between 115 billion and 135 billion dollars, yet the full-year operating profit will still be higher than in 2025. After the financial report is released, the market's judgment will be swift: whether the profitability of the advertising business can continue to cover the expansion speed of AI investment.

Amazon's problem is not just about investing a lot, but also about the timing of when the money invested will yield returns. CEO Andy Jassy clearly stated in his shareholder letter that most of the cloud business capital expenditure in 2026 will gradually materialize between 2027 and 2028. AWS added 3.9 GW of power capacity in 2025 and expects to double the total capacity by the end of 2027, but the company still acknowledges constraints on capacity and unmet demand. This time, the market will