Big US tech stocks swing as investors probe AI spending

big us tech stocks swung wildly wednesday as investors parsed massive ai spending across the four giants. meta, alphabet, microsoft, and amazon all reported first-quarter results on the same day. meta's shares slumped over 5% after hours after it raised its planned capital expenditure to as much as $145bn, up from a previous max of $135bn. cfo susan li said the company had "underestimated our compute needs" in past years. alphabet jumped almost 6% after profits rose 30% and google cloud grew 63%, which it tied directly to ai usage. microsoft beat revenue expectations with a 16% increase to $83bn, but its free cash flow dropped nearly $6bn to $15.8bn. amazon shares fell after warning next quarter's profit would be lower, though its cloud business grew 28% — the biggest jump in over four years. analyst lee sustar at forrester said there's still anxiety "about the sustainability of the ai boom" given high costs and unrealized gains. but the companies are pushing ahead anyway. zuckerberg said he doesn't have "a very precise plan for exactly how each product is going to scale."