Tech Earnings Preview: What, Who, When and How Much Money Again?“ I don’t know, probably at least around $600 gazillion dollars ,” Zuck, probably if you asked him how much Meta NASDAQ:META will spend over the fiscal year.
It’s earnings season , which means Wall Street’s most expensive hobby — guessing how much the tech giants will make while pretending it’s about “long-term fundamentals” — is back in full swing.
💥 Welcome to Earnings Season
Happy third-quarter earnings, everyone. The candles are lit, the spreadsheets are out, and $1.6 trillion vanished from US stock valuations last Friday. Perfect timing.
Markets are reeling from tariff shocks and macro jitters, but traders have already shifted their gaze to the next big thing: Big Tech .
As is tradition, the Magnificent Seven — those trillion-dollar titans who make up roughly one-third of the S&P 500’s SP:SPX weight — are once again the main characters in this quarterly drama.
You’ve got AI. You’ve got spending. And you’ve got spending on AI.
🔔 Here We Go Again
This quarter, the storyline hasn’t changed much — it’s still “show me the money” season for artificial intelligence. Investors have spent the better part of two years rewarding CEOs for throwing the AI acronym in all their earnings calls. Is this time different?
• Amazon NASDAQ:AMZN reports the week of October 21, with everyone eyeing AWS — the quiet moneymaker funding Jeff Bezos’ rocket ambitions and your Prime Day discounts.
• Apple NASDAQ:AAPL , Microsoft NASDAQ:MSFT , and Meta NASDAQ:META follow around October 29. Investors will be laser-focused on who’s turning AI hype into product and revenue.
• And let’s not forget Alphabet NASDAQ:GOOGL , which already set the tone with a capex number that could fund a small country — $85 billion in 2025 alone , largely for AI infrastructure.
The question now: how much longer can these companies throw billions at Jensen Huang GPUs before shareholders start asking for a receipt?
🏗️ The AI Arms Race: Spending as a Strategy
The Magnificent Seven are still in an all-out hardware and data-center build-out. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is burning through cash to create the metaverse (yes, that still exists), but this time, powered by AI.
Nearly every megacap tech firm is building power plants to feed OpenAI. And Nvidia NASDAQ:NVDA — the company selling shovels in the AI gold rush — is counting every dollar.
Together, these firms are expected to spend hundreds of billions in the second half of 2025 just on computing power. Investors will be parsing every line of guidance for capex updates — because right now, spending is the strategy.
But the logic is sound (for now): If AI really does drive the next wave of productivity and profit, then whoever builds the infrastructure owns the future.
📊 The Numbers Game: What Wall Street Expects
Across the S&P 500 SP:SPX , earnings are projected to grow 8.8% year-over-year this quarter, on revenue growth of 6.4%, according to Seaport Research Partners. That may sound modest, but it’s for a reason: two-thirds of companies usually beat estimates.
Keep them achievable, and markets will celebrate. Pin them too high, and markets will be disappointed.
What’s more, earnings aren’t expected to stall anytime soon. FactSet data shows analysts projecting:
• 6.4% average annual sales growth for the S&P 500 through 2027
• 14% average annual earnings growth over the same period
That’s what rate cuts are supposed to do — a little liquidity trick, some risk-on mood, and suddenly even industrials and Buffett’s picks start looking interesting again.
Still, there’s one elephant in the room: valuation. The S&P 500 trades at 23 times forward earnings, which is, to use the technical term, “a lot.” At that level, even a small earnings miss could send stocks tumbling.
🧮 Winners, Losers, and the Market’s Short Memory
Some IPOs may have stolen headlines this year — looking at you, Figma NYSE:FIG and Circle NYSE:CRCL — but earnings season is where the real judgment happens.
A good report can add hundreds of billions in market cap overnight. But a bad one can do the same in the opposite direction .
Meta is under pressure to prove its huge spending on Superintelligence Labs is actually worth it. Apple’s got to show iPhone sales didn’t flatline in China. And Microsoft? Well, all it has to do is keep being Microsoft.
Amazon remains the dark horse. Its cloud business is stabilizing, retail’s humming along, and AI integration is just starting to take off. Traders are betting AWS will deliver, as it usually does.
🧘♂️ What Traders Should Watch
To navigate this volatility buffet, focus on:
• Forward guidance — Companies might beat earnings but guide lower, which can trigger pullbacks.
• Capex updates — Follow where the AI billions are flowing.
• Market reactions, not just results — The “sell the news” trade is real.
Sometimes the earnings game isn’t just about who made money — it’s about who surprised the market.
💡 Final Thought: Hype or Habit?
Big Tech’s gravitational pull on the markets isn’t fading anytime soon. Whether you’re bullish on AI or skeptical of its trillion-dollar promises, one thing’s certain — every move these companies make will ripple through every portfolio, index, and ETF on the planet.
As Q3 earnings hit full throttle, keep one eye on the charts and the other on the headlines . Because if there’s one thing Wall Street loves more than good earnings, it’s the story that comes after.
Off to you : How are you preparing to navigate the earnings season and the tech updates? Share your thoughts in the comments!
