This week brings a huge earnings test for AAPL, AMZN, GOOG, META and MSFT. I’m going to sell Microsoft out of my 12-18 month Jubak Picks Portfolio on Monday, April 27, ahead of the earnings report. That position is up 319% since I initiated it on June 14., 2018. I am keeping Microsoft in my long-term 50 Stocks Portfolio. That position is up 40% since I initiated it on January 18, 2022.
China’s AI disruptor DeepSeek is preparing to introduce a new model. Reuters had initially reported that DeepSeek would launch its next‑generation model “V4,” focused on coding, in mid‑February 2026. Rumors now peg the expected release window as “Q1–Q2 2026.” The mid‑February window has passed but context‑window changes and internal benchmark leaks signal that V4 is close. And it will be a BIG DEAL for AI competitors AND ai chipmakers such as Nvidia (NVDA). A big enough deal that the V4 release will move the entire tech sector and quite probably the stock market as a whole.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) reported that January sales grew at their fastest clip in months. The contract chipmaker for Nvidia, Apple, and virtually every AI company reported a 37% rise in January revenue to $12.7 billion, above the 30% revenue growth the company projects for the full year. Those results confirm the company’s decision to budget as much as $56 billion in capital spending this year, which would be up 25% from 2025. The ADRs rose 1.83% today, Tuesday, February 10, to close at $361.91. For investors, the question is what next. The Wall Street consensus target is $392–410, implying a low‑ to mid‑teens upside from the current price. Is that enough reason to hold onto the shares? Is there a reason to buy even more?
Alphabet/Google (G00G) borrowed another $20 billion in its biggest ever U.S. dollar bond sale on Monday. And that’s just the beginning. The company is also planning debut deals in Switzerland and the UK. Including the sale of 100-year bonds.
Drum role, please: That would be the the first time a tech company has tried a 100-year offering since the Dotcom boom of the late 1990s. (Remember how that ended?) The big borrowing spree comes just days after tech companies from Meta Platforms (META) to Amazon.com (AMZN) said they were ramping up capital spending to build out infrastructure for AI. Those capital spending plans sent AI sector stocks into a steep decline on fears that AI companies would not be able to generate the cash flow needed to fund these capital spending plans. But that was sooo last week.
A Next Big Thing doesn’t need to start with a blank slate. Yes, it can be a whole new industry or sector–as is true with quantum computing or nuclear fusion. But it doesn’t have to be. Artificial intelligence, for example may look like it came out of nowhere but here were precursor companies and technologies such as neural network computation. And sometimes an existing sector can get a big jolt that serves to accelerate grow to such a degree that it makes it see like the sector came out of nowhere. And where the acceleration to growth is big enough so that it reorders the ranks of the companies that had been dominating the sector. Right now I think that’s a good description of what’s about to happen in the cyber security sector. Thanks to AI and the coming emergence of quantum computing we’re about to see a huge surge in growth for the companies in the sector.
A week of Big Tech earnings reports will confirm or reverse what sure looks like a sector rotation away from tech shares and into metal and mining company stocks.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) has told Nvidia (NVDA) and Broadcom (AVGO) that its advanced capacity is effectively fully booked through 2026 and that it cannot meet all of their requested AI chip volumes.
Prices for memory chips are forecast to soar in 2026. but what just as bad/even worse it looks like chip customers are looking at serious supply shortages during the year.
Higher prices and supply shortages could be enough to put earnings at risk at some high multiple cloud and AI companies.
A suggested quantum computing portfolio. If you want a piece of this Next Big Thing, but with less risk and less upside than a pure-play quantum stock, I’d suggest Alphabet/Google (GOOG). Among pure plays I’d include D‑Wave Quantum (QBTS), up about 235% year‑to‑date as of late 2025; Rigetti Computing (RGTI), up34% YTD by late December; and IonQ (IONQ), up around 25% year-to-date by late December.
Alphabet/Google’s Gemini AI is rapidly gaining momentum, with 30% growth in monthly active users versus ChatGPT’s 6% growth between August and November 2025.
CEO Sam Altman has declared a “code red” at OpenAI to improve ChatGPT as the company faces intense competition from rivals, such as Alphabet (GOOG) with much deeper pockets.
To my mind the question of whether any AI startup can “win” against Big Tech competitors such as Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) is as important to investors as the questions raised by short sellers about depreciation accounting and potential debt bombs.
According to a report by tech news site the Information, the CEO of the San Francisco-based startup told staff in an internal memo: “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.”
OpenAI has been rattled by the success of Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3, and is devoting more internal resources to improving ChatGPT.
No slowdown on plans for AI capital spending in earnings results this past week from Big Tech. Alphabet/Google (GOOG) said it was increasing what it planned to spend on A.I. data center projects this year by $6 billion, after spending nearly $64 billion over the past nine months. Microsoft (MSFT) said it had spent $35 billion in its latest quarter, $5 billion more than it had told investors to expect just a few months ago.
Amazon (AMZN) said it would be “very aggressive” in adding more data centers and would spend $125 billion this year-— and even more next year. Meta Platforms (META) raised its spending forecast to at least $70 billion by the end of the year, which would be nearly double what it spent last year. The stock market reaction wasn’t unalloyed joy. Investors seemed generally positive on spending plans from Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. And skeptical of Meta’s strategy and spending.
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