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.
Journey back with me to the heady days of 1999 when another technology boom pushed stocks to record highs on the promise of revolutionizing everything. Why is this exercise important?Because it’s a real life example of the work on the role of monopolies in our economy by economists like Joan Robinson and Paul Sweezy. Their work begins with the extreme excess returns that companies with effective monopoly power generate–and points to the important role that monopolies play in the business cycle of boom and bust. And because monopoly economics are critical to deciding if the current generation of AI stocks are really going to be worth what investors now say they are.
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?
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.
Will OpenAI go broke this year? 2027% Never?–with the company navigating its way to a company-saving initial public offering in 2026 or 2027?
The company’s current attempt to raise an additional $50 billion in venture capital from Middle Eastern investors will certainly help answer the question.
And the answer isn’t of interest only to those private investors who have put $57.9–$64 billion into the company across 11 funding rounds. OpenAI owes so much money to the companies supplying its chips and building its data centers–an estimated $1.4 trillion in contingent liabilities– that an OpenAI failure would dent–or worse–the entire technology sector.
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.
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.
Microsoft (MSFT) ended its fiscal year beating the top- and bottom-line estimates. For the fourth quarter that ended in June revenues came in at $76.4 billion, up 18.1% year over year and beating analyst estimates by $2.57 billion. Diluted EPS of $3.65 was up 23.7% year over year and beat analyst estimates by $0.27 a share. Operating margins came in strong at 44.9%, which represents an expansion of 180 basis points. The company also raised guidance. For Fiscal Year 2026 the company expects another year where revenues and operating income grow in the double-digits. Management projected Fiscal Year 2026 capital expenditures to moderate compared to fiscal 2025. Operating margins are expected to be flat year over year. But what’s especially impressive about the quarter to me is the balance between current growth and growth in the units that represent the company’s future.
For the coming fiscal year, big tech’s total capital expenditure on AI is slated to balloon, leaving the total for 2024 in the dust. In total, the four tech companies will spend more than $400 billion on capex in the coming year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Going forward, I’m not all that interested in investing in the “old” Magnificent Seven. But I am interested in investing in a new “enhanced” Magnificent Seven that builds on and increases the exposure of these stocks to the market’s AI enthusiasm.
Microsoft (MSFT) is laying off slightly less than 4% of its global workforce—around 9,000 workers—in another major round of layoffs.
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