Meta tanks 10%, Alphabet climbs 5% as each company raises capex spend

meta shares plunged 10% thursday, pacing for its worst day since october 2025. alphabet climbed 5%, its best day since november 2025. both companies raised capex, but wall street reacted differently. alphabet topped q1 revenue estimates, helped by google cloud revenue jumping 63% from a year ago. ceo sundar pichai said cloud growth was driven by demand for enterprise ai solutions. alphabet raised its capex forecast to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175-$185 billion. meta also beat earnings and revenue expectations, but its daily active people were dragged down quarter-over-quarter by "internet disruptions in iran." meta raised its capex range to $125-$145 billion, up from $115-$135 billion, citing higher component pricing and additional data center costs. unlike alphabet, microsoft, and amazon, meta lacks a cloud infrastructure business to turn ai spending into revenue. jpmorgan downgraded meta to neutral from overweight, citing a "challenging path" to generating returns on heavy capex.