Nathaniel Whittemore

And yet at the same time, the number that got the most attention was of course a massive increase in CapEx guidance.

Meta said that they plan to increase spending on data centers to as much as $135 billion this year, around 20% higher than the median analyst forecast and almost double what they spent last year.

They also announced a 40% rise in expenses, reflecting their huge salary commitments to their new AI research team.

Now, Meta is generating around $60 billion in quarterly revenue at the moment, so these spending goals suggest reliance on debt funding.

Still, Zuckerberg has said that the aim is to front-load CapEx and build as fast as possible to get back in the AI race.

Rounding out his statement, Zuckerberg told investors, This is going to be a big year for delivering personal superintelligence, accelerating our business, building infrastructure for the future, and shaping how our company will work going forward.

Now, some had big critiques of Meta's apparent lack of a plan.

One analyst asked Zuckerberg to sketch out his three, five, or 10-year plan for delivering ROI on all of the AI spending, and Zuckerberg kind of sidestepped the question.

He responded, I have to say up front that I think my answers to a lot of your questions on this particular call may be somewhat unfulfilling because we're in this interesting period where we've been rebuilding our AI effort.

We're six months into that and I'm happy with how it's going, but we are going to be rolling out our initial set of models and products and businesses around that, and I'll have a lot more to share on all those fronts at that point.

He added, not much of this is going to be particularly detailed, but it will be exciting as we roll it out.

Others honed in on Meta's new focus on debt financing.

KakashianX wrote, Zuck has finished almost all of Meta's cash.

Without the issuance of $30 billion in debt, Meta's cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash equivalents would be less than $10 billion by the end of 2025.

Prominent finance commenter Michael Green said the risk embedded here is astonishing.

And yet, ultimately, it seemed that investors liked what they heard, with meta shares rising 8% in after-hours trading overnight.

The story from Microsoft earnings call was something of the inverse, where the perception was that too much caution had led them to miss out on AI opportunities.

The headline figure, as we heard from Caroline at the beginning, was a continued drop in cloud growth.

One could be forgiven for thinking that this slowdown doesn't seem to actually be that large of a problem.

Azure revenues are still growing at a 38% pace, and the slowdown was only a single percentage point compared to the prior quarter.