The Briefing

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Greetings!

Get ready. We’ve got a slew of big tech earnings reports this week—from Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple—that will pick up from Google’s report last week on the state of AI spending and business. PayPal is also reporting on Tuesday, so we should get some insight into the payment firm’s attitude toward Stripe’s recent takeover offer with private equity backing, about which PayPal has so far been conspicuously silent.

But the main event will be the big tech earnings, starting with Meta and Microsoft on Wednesday. The two companies have both been under more pressure on Wall Street this year than other leading tech firms—as of Friday, shares of Meta were down 9.8% year to date, while Microsoft stock was down 21%. Meta is out of favor because of its humongous AI spending with no clear way of getting a return, while Microsoft’s prospects of keeping its giant software business humming in the face of AI alternatives worry investors.

Investors are surely hoping Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will offer an update on whether he is going to rent out spare computing capacity to others, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX has done, bringing in extra revenue. Meta’s recent hiring of a longtime top Amazon Web Services executive suggests Meta is moving in that direction. As for Microsoft, we’ll be watching Azure’s growth rate, which has been hovering around 40% lately, to see whether it leaps ahead as Google Cloud did in the second quarter. The number of Microsoft 365 Copilot AI subscribers will be a closely watched indicator of Microsoft’s momentum in software AI sales.

Amazon, which reports on Thursday alongside Apple, faces similar questions about its AI spending, particularly as its projected capital expenditures of $200 billion are more than the $185 billion analysts expect the company to generate in cash from operations, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. That means Amazon has to dip into its cash reserves—which it has beefed up with several bond offerings lately. As with the other big cloud firms, investors will be closely watching for any acceleration in AWS’ growth rate, which rose 4 percentage points to 28% in the first quarter.

Apple is the outlier. Its AI spending is minimal and its main business engine—the iPhone—has been enjoying strong growth lately after years of stagnation. It seems a bunch of consumers are finally upgrading their phones. Understandably, Apple’s stock risen 23% so far this year, making it a standout. But there are clouds on the horizon, notably soaring memory chip prices which have prompted Apple to raise prices on some hardware, with iPhone price hikes expected this fall. The impact of higher memory costs on Apple's profit margins, as well as consumer reaction to price hikes, will both be worth tracking.

Here’s what analysts are expecting for each company, with estimates courtesy of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Meta Platforms (Wednesday)

Revenue: $60.26 billion +26.8%

Earnings per share: $7.22 +1.1%

Microsoft (Wednesday)

Revenue: $87.672 billion +14.6%

EPS: $4.22 +15.6%

Amazon (Thursday)

Revenue: $195.97 billion +16.8%

EPS: $1.82 +8.3%

Apple (Thursday)

Revenue: $108.89 billion +15.8%

EPS: $1.89 +20%

DeepSeek’s Postponed Fundraising

Liang Wenfeng, founder of the Chinese AI phenomenon DeepSeek, should never move to Silicon Valley—his operating style is, let us say, different. For one thing, as my colleagues reported in this profile, he’s a fan of work-life balance. “He believes any individual’s optimal productivity can only last six to eight hours a day, and there’s no point in toiling away beyond that,” as our story said. Huh.

And then there was his decision in recent days to put fundraising talks on hold, as The Information reported, after a transcript of a call he had with investors leaked and went viral on Chinese social media. Liang was not pleased, according to our report.

Imagine if every U.S. startup abandoned fundraising talks because details of what executives told investors got leaked? No one would ever raise money. Even more puzzling is that DeepSeek has been planning to go public. How is DeepSeek going to operate as a public company if Liang is so sensitive to what gets out into the public realm?

In Other News

• Online fashion retailer Shein revealed in paperwork for its forthcoming Hong Kong Stock Exchange IPO that last year’s elimination of regulations allowing retailers to import low-cost items without paying duties had hit its business hard. Shein’s revenue growth slowed to 1.1% in the first quarter of 2026, while its U.S. business shrank 14%. The company lost money in the first quarter. More here.

• Many of the largest U.S. tech companies signed a joint letter on Friday defending open-source AI software as the Trump administration considers possible restrictions on Chinese labs. The letter—signed by Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz, along with AI startups like Reflection and Hugging Face—argued that open-weight AI models strengthen competition and expand access to the AI economy. Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic were not among the signatories.

• OpenAI President Greg Brockman said Thursday he supported a recent suggestion from longtime rival Elon Musk that leading AI developers meet every few weeks to discuss and share safety and security concerns about the technology.

• SpaceX completed its 13th test flight of its Starship rocket on Friday night after aborting a test launch last week, the first completed launch since the company went public last month.

• Alphabet’s Waymo is weighing an exit from its Uber partnership in which riders can hail Waymo robataxis from Uber’s app, the Financial Times reported.

Friday on The Information’s TITV

Check out Friday’s episode of TITV in which we discuss the open letter from Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia on open-source regulations.

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