Public announcements and financial reports from Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon

Microsoft and Meta Report Strong Earnings, Plan $80B and $60-65B AI Investments Amid $270B Big Tech Capex Surge

Jan 29, 2025, 10:28 PM

Microsoft Corp. reported a 10% increase in quarterly profit for the period ending December 31, 2024, with net income reaching $24.1 billion, or $3.23 per share, surpassing Wall Street's expectations of $3.11 per share. The company's revenue for the quarter was $69.6 billion, up 12% from the previous year, also beating the anticipated $68.87 billion. However, the growth in its Azure cloud computing services was lighter than expected, with a 31% increase compared to the previous quarter's 33%. Of this growth, 13 percentage points were attributed to artificial intelligence (AI) services. Microsoft has committed to spending $80 billion in the current fiscal year to expand its AI infrastructure, despite concerns raised by the efficiency of AI models from Chinese startup DeepSeek. Meanwhile, Meta Platforms Inc. reported record quarterly revenue of $48.39 billion and net income of $20.84 billion for the fourth quarter of 2024, up 21% and 49% respectively, with earnings per share at $8.02. The company's average daily users across its apps reached 3.35 billion. Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to increase capital expenditures to between $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025, driven by investments in AI data centers, including a 2-gigawatt data center and plans to deploy 1.3 million GPUs. This move is part of a broader trend among Big Tech companies, with Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon expected to collectively spend a record $270 billion on capital expenditures this year, largely fueled by AI investments.