After Microsoft’s and Alphabet’s closely watched AI earnings, big questions remain

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Yesterday saw a broad tech stock selloff, following Microsoft’s and Alphabet’s quarterly earnings on Tuesday.

Microsoft fell 2.7% and Alphabet 7.5%, while Apple (–1.9%), Amazon (–2.4%), and Nvidia (–2%) also got dragged down. As I wrote on Monday, this week’s results were always going to be seen as an indicator of the wider Big-Tech-AI sector’s prospects. So, is this as damning as it may appear at first?

Eh—frankly, the jury’s still out. Certainly, in the last quarter, both Microsoft and Google saw a substantial lift (20% and 26%, respectively) in cloud revenues, in both cases beating analyst expectations. Alphabet’s more substantial drop in its share price was largely down to disappointing ad revenues, but with both Alphabet and Microsoft, investors seem to have been a little put off by the massive infrastructural costs the companies forecast as the AI race continues this year. Both pared much of those stock losses this morning, as did their peers.

The fact is, we still don’t know exactly what we’re seeing here. Even though Microsoft hasn’t revealed sales or user figures for Copilot, its AI-powered chatbot, there does seem to be a good amount of uptake—but what are companies using it for? Everyone’s yelling at them, telling them to adopt AI or be left behind, so of course they’re experimenting. But will that translate to systematic usage, and to what degree?

In the words of Forrester analyst Lee Sustar, as quoted by the Financial Times, Alphabet’s and Microsoft’s customers are in “’buy AI now, figure out if it works later’ mode.” We can say for sure that lots of people are interested in AI and that building it out is hella expensive, but time will tell if we’re witnessing the effects of hype or something more sustainable.

Another thing worth watching is the PC market, in which vendors are tying revived uptake to the AI revolution. After all, a lot if not most of AI inference is going to take place on-device rather than in the data center. Qualcomm, which is preparing to take on both Apple silicon and Intel and AMD’s x86-based processors with its ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite chipsets, said yesterday that the promising product will appear in the middle of the year, before back-to-school season.

“We’re tracking to the launch of products with this chipset tied with the next version of Microsoft Windows that has a lot of the Windows AI capabilities,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in an earnings call. “We expect Snapdragon X Elite to set the industry benchmark for on-device gen AI and Copilot experiences in addition to leading performance and battery life for next-generation Windows PCs.” As The Register points out, hints of this AI-ified Windows version abound, but Microsoft hasn’t actually announced it yet.

How will Microsoft strike the local/cloud AI balance in Windows 12, or whatever it’s going to be called? And what will that mean for its revenues? Again, so many questions. More news below.

David Meyer

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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