Luria Sees Good Signs Ahead for Big Tech After Earnings

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]Gil Laurie is standing by right now. He's managing director and head of technology research at D.A. Davidson.

[00:00:05]I don't know if you've had a chance to catch your breath here, Jill.

[00:00:08]A lot of numbers crossing the wire. And I don't know, maybe you can kind of make sense of it here. Are we looking at a good thing or a bad thing right now when it comes to these four major hyperscalers?

[00:00:17]It's a good thing. And the difference in stock reactions really just has to do with how high the expectations where it looks like in the three critical data center businesses, the hyperscale, our businesses exceeded expectations. They're all still accelerating.

[00:00:32]MWC, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud accelerating, still growing faster and faster. And that's a very good sign in terms of the progress of A.I.. That's a key takeaway.

[00:00:42]The stocks are reacting differently because expectations from us were for even higher. And for Microsoft, investors were a little more skeptical. But both look good, as does Google Cloud. From an initial look, it looks like advertising for Google and Medha is also strong.

[00:00:58]That that has to do with the broader strength of the economy.

[00:01:01]Amazon, the retail side look good, has to do with the broader strength of the economy. So I'd say yeah, overall first look is a positive look from all these companies, a positive look for all these companies.

[00:01:11]And you course know it was a couple of days ago where everybody was kind of wringing their hands over that Wall Street Journal report about Openai and its sales and internal metrics that, at least according to that report, were falling short. And of course, everybody started looking at this broader A.I. ecosystem, particularly the Hyperscalers. The idea, let's face it, all these names we're talking about right now, they have basically been the main financiers, if you will, of this buildout. Do you get the sense here that these companies will remain committed to some of these CapEx forecasts?

[00:01:40]And more importantly, do you think they feel confident enough to articulate some sort of return on investment or at least being able to communicate that to investors? Yeah, we'll find out soon enough.

[00:01:51]A lot of it's going to be in the commentary on the calls, but yes, they are seeing very strong demand. That article about open air was really a backward looking article and it was a little out of context because one of the things that happened open is that Google Gemini did so well is that Entropic is doing so well. Overall, if you look at across anthropic and open air, the $50 billion revenue run rate they were at zero two years ago, that is the ROI. By the time you add what Google's getting in revenue and the direct revenue Amazon, Microsoft and Google are getting from selling these services, the returns are showing up, the demand is off the charts. We know that because anthropic is compute constrained. So we're likely to hear very positive commentary about demand. The subtlety will be the supply side.

[00:02:38]Can we build data centers fast enough to supply that demand?

[00:02:42]Given all the bottlenecks CPU's in memory and advanced packaging in optical and Interurban, that's where a lot of the conversation is going to be.

[00:02:51]But I would expect the commentary over the next couple of hours to be very positive about the demand environment. And I just want to point out, too, I mean, they actually did talk about those Gemini Enterprise numbers, 40% quarter on quarter growth you reported. So basically talking about the sequential growth here. So pretty substantial growth there.

[00:03:09]Yeah, absolutely. Bill Gill, I do want to talk about CapEx specifically in the context of matter, because you take a look at shares right now down more than 5% after hours. They did boost their full year CapEx guide. And I mean, this is something that Meta has gotten dinged for in the past. We know that they're trying to offset those costs when it comes to maybe shrinking the workforce.

[00:03:30]But when you think about, you know, the year ahead, all of this CapEx that's coming through, does it make as much sense for America to be spending these types of numbers? It does not, because Microsoft, Amazon and Google are selling most of that capacity.

[00:03:48]It's all for internal use. These are very, very high levels of CapEx for internal use. Unless they start selling external capacity at some point. This is this is coming out of their shareholders pockets and that's why shareholders are reacting strongly.

[00:04:06]Whatever the CapEx and the optics for MedTech grow faster than the revenue growth, which is substantial, investors react badly to that because it's all for internal use. Where again, Microsoft, Amazon, Google are going to talk about how the demand from from from the economy, from consumers, from enterprises is rising. Matter is only using it to train its own models and deliver its own models. So Gill, where does the story go for Mehta then? Are we just setting up for another year of efficiency? We know that we ended up in that situation a couple of years ago. And to some, I mean, we're looking at a very similar sort of backdrop right now. Yeah, I think that part of the answer is going to be that the OpEx is going to have to decline going forward if they're going to increase CapEx that much. And then at some point either turns around and start selling that capacity or slows down this CapEx and at the very least delivers a model that's competitive.

[00:05:04]Right now, the frontier models that come are coming out of measure aren't even in the top five. We have openly anthropic Google.

[00:05:11]Then we have some Chinese, we have Gronk.

[00:05:13]Man is not even in the top ten, I would say, in terms of its frontier model, unless they show they can be competitive, their investors are going to expect them to either calm down on the CapEx or reduce enough CapEx to allow margins not to be degraded. The good news for men is the top line is still growing very fast in the advertising business, very strong.

[00:05:32]And they make the argument that because we're so good at AI, that's why we're selling so many more ads at higher prices.

[00:05:40]That only goes so far.