Big Tech earnings are back. You're listening to Motley Fool Money.

Welcome, Fools. I'm your host, Rick Minars, and with me is San Mate Dio. Fellow Fool, fellow analyst. Thanks for being here. We're back with more earnings previews. Sam Meat, how are you doing this fine Monday that I know you're in the Northeast? There was a lot of snow there. How are you shoveling your way through this? Yeah, staying warm and getting through it. But I'm excited to be here talking about tech earnings. Yes, nothing heats up snowing, makes it melt faster than tech earnings,

and that's what we're going to tackle today. So in a minute, we're going to go over what to expect. There's a lot of big earnings report coming out this week in the tech world. Apple, meta, Microsoft, they all report earnings later this week. We're going to take a look at that. But first, let's start with a little bit of big macro from a tech perspective. Big tech companies like

Alphabet, Amazon, meta, Apple, and Microsoft are substantially increasing their capital expenditures

in 2024 and 2025 with further growth expected in 26, primarily driven by investments

at AI infrastructure. Apple, while also increasing spending, maintains a more modest hybrid

cloud strategy. Here's some data, basically from projections on what they spent last year in 2025, 25%

versus 2024, alphabet, 75% increase in AI-related spending.

Amazon, 50%, meta, 90%, Microsoft, 69%.

Apple, which seems to be bringing a BB gun to an arms race, 35%. And they're all expected to grow. They're spending in 2026 and understandably so. So let's talk about this, Sam Meat. What do you think are your expectations? Are these companies going to be spending more or less, these five big hyperscalers? And you may call Apple and hyper-failor if you want, I don't mind. Do you expect growth

rates to continue, A, growing, and be at the kind of speed that we're seeing it grow? Yeah, I mean, I think it's all gas, no breaks for AI spending here because Apple is trying to keep up. So they just signed with Google to use Gemini and they're in their series. So I can't imagine that's going to be cheap. I can't imagine it's going

to involve further investment in their part to ramp up their AI. And, you know, meta just

continues to astound us with the numbers they report every quarter when it comes to their

their KappaX spending. And Zuckerberg's not holding back. He is not afraid to spend. And so at least with those

two, I think, there'll be quite a bit of spending. Alphabet, they're in the lead. They'll continue

to spend, I think. So I think that we're going to see accelerated spending in CAPEX relate to AI as

we roll out earnings here. Yeah, and I agree.

I think even though we're saying, well, hey, scalability, if definition should get lower,

AI should get cheaper, we're not seeing that.

And I think at this point where you have to keep up with the Joneses, especially if you're

in the Mag 7 and you want to keep up in this race, and I think Apple will eventually do it.

I think Apple right now is almost like Nintendo in the console war that they almost feel like, hey, we have a great brand. You know you're going to buy us. Our kids love it. And we have IP. We're very easy to use. They've never been about the spec wars. But I think this is probably the year, especially now with having success with the iPhone 17, off to a strong start. They're going to finally come through with what they've been promising for about two years now, and that's make it AI-centric. But, I mean, I have another question here. And then basically we're talking about these five big tech companies, they're spending a lot of money on CapEx. Do you think that this will continue to be a big tech game, or is there a market for other companies to come in, at least in just to spend more? Like, as far as percentage of spending on AI, how do you think this is going to go? I mean, I think this is going to be across the board with not just big tech companies. I think we're going to see a lot of companies continue to spend more in AI. As, you know, AI is, you have to think of it as like a backbone for your company and your technology that runs your company.

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