New York, April 28, 2026, 06:49 EDT
- Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are set to report Wednesday, bringing renewed attention to AI capital spending — data centers, chips, and other big-ticket assets.
- Nvidia and Broadcom are still the key chip-infrastructure stocks in the spotlight. As for Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, investors are left wrestling with a harder issue: the pace at which AI starts to drive real revenue.
- Valuation isn’t the only worry now—oil prices, cloud investment, regulatory pressure, and AI-driven shakeups are all hitting simultaneously.
This week throws the spotlight on Big Tech’s $600 billion AI spending spree, with Nvidia, Broadcom, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta in the thick of the “best AI stocks to buy today” argument ahead of Wednesday’s big earnings lineup. Reports are on tap from Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon. Investors will be tracking whether those heavy AI investments are showing up in cloud sales, advertising gains, and enterprise software growth. Reuters
The game has shifted. The AI trade isn’t just a story anymore—now it’s about results. Reuters says these four firms are heading toward a combined $600 billion spend on AI this year, a massive investment that’s put a noticeable dent in free cash flow and ramped up shareholder pressure. “What’s the return” on all that money, asks Joe Maginot, large-cap portfolio manager at Madison Investments. Reuters
That burst of optimism from last week’s rally didn’t stick. U.S. stock-index futures slipped early Tuesday, with persistent U.S.-Iran tensions still rattling oil markets; as of 5:36 a.m. ET, Nasdaq 100 futures had dropped 0.51%, according to Reuters. “Geopolitics is still an active and important variable for risk,” said Ameriprise Financial chief market strategist Anthony Saglimbene. Reuters
Nvidia remains the standout big-name play for AI chips—the engines behind training and deploying major models. According to Reuters’ market commentary, Nvidia shares have notched fresh highs, tacking on over $1 trillion in market cap across the last month. Yet on Tuesday before the bell, chip names like AMD and Arm lagged, with risk appetite fading.
Broadcom isn’t the most straightforward story, but its importance in infrastructure keeps growing. Earlier this month, the company announced a multi-year pact with Google that will see it developing and supplying custom AI chips and components for Google’s upcoming AI racks, extending out to 2031. There’s also a separate arrangement: Anthropic will tap about 3.5 gigawatts of AI compute powered by Google processors, with access kicking in starting 2027.
The Broadcom-Google deal is notable: it nudges the chip market past Nvidia’s dominant GPUs and into the world of custom silicon. Google’s latest, its eighth-gen Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), are designed for AI and now will separate into two distinct systems—one for training models, another just for inference, or putting trained models to work.
Microsoft’s name keeps popping up in debates. On Monday, the company restructured its OpenAI partnership, giving up its sole right to sell OpenAI models—now, OpenAI is free to pitch to Amazon and Google Cloud clients. D.A. Davidson & Co. analyst Gil Luria called the revised agreement “essential” for OpenAI’s push into the enterprise market. Microsoft, though, still holds onto a 20% cut of revenues through 2030. Reuters
Microsoft scored a major enterprise customer: Accenture will deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot to roughly 743,000 staffers, marking the largest Copilot rollout yet. But according to Reuters, only about 3% of Microsoft’s more than 450 million enterprise 365 users are paying for the $30-per-month service. Julie Sweet, Accenture’s CEO, said teams are already shifting to “higher-value work.” Microsoft’s Charles Lamanna pointed to demand benefits from the product’s multi-model support. Reuters
Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta offer investors varying degrees of exposure. For the January-March quarter, expected cloud growth hits 25% for Amazon Web Services, 40% at Microsoft Azure, and a sharp 50.1% for Google Cloud, according to Visible Alpha and LSEG figures cited by Reuters. Meta looks set for a 31% sales bump, driven by AI-powered ad targeting, while Alphabet and Amazon are both on track for double-digit revenue gains.
There’s another, less tidy AI situation for Meta. According to Reuters on Tuesday, citing the Wall Street Journal, the company is working to reverse its acquisition of AI startup Manus after China shut down the deal over national-security concerns. The episode suggests AI assets are shifting into the realm of strategic property, moving past the category of ordinary software.
Citi bumped its global AI market outlook up to over $4.2 trillion by 2030, from a previous $3.5 trillion-plus estimate, pointing to a pick-up in enterprise uptake for coding and automation. Anthropic, as Citi put it, is “the leader in enterprise AI”—highlighting how valuations for public companies are also shaped by private lab demand for everything from cloud to chips and electricity. Reuters
The trade comes with complications. According to Goldman Sachs analysts, profits projected more than a decade out—the so-called terminal value—now make up roughly 75% of the S&P 500’s equity value, putting it close to levels last seen 25 years ago. Goldman estimates that if long-term growth assumptions fall by a single point, S&P 500 enterprise value could slide around 15%. High-growth stocks would feel that pain more acutely.
The list of AI stocks worth watching keeps shrinking for now. Nvidia and Broadcom handle the infrastructure story, while Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta face pressure to prove that all this AI investment translates into real user growth, rising cloud demand, and stronger ad revenue. Investors get clarity on Wednesday’s results, which should settle whether “best AI stocks to buy today” still hinges on growth—or if discipline is about to take the spotlight.
