Alphabet, Microsoft earnings show hefty AI bets are driving growth
stocks on Friday with earnings that showed big AI investments were driving growth, allaying doubts that their costly bets would take time to pay off after a soft forecast from Meta Platforms.
Alphabet rose 10%, crossing $2 trillion in market value with a gain of about $180 billion as it sweetened the pot for investors with its maiden dividend and a $70 billion stock buyback.
The world's fourth most valuable firm flirted with the milestone on an intraday basis over three years ago although it never closed above that level, according to LSEG Datastream.
Microsoft gained nearly 3% and was set to add more than $80 billion to its market value.
After pouring billions of dollars into the infrastructure needed to support AI applications, both Alphabet and Microsoft reported that their quarterly revenue growth was outpacing expectations as more users turn to services including the Copilot AI assistant and the Gemini chatbot.
AI services accounted for 7 percentage points of the 31% jump in revenue at Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing platform between January and March, finance chief Amy Hood said.
She added near-term AI demand was a bit higher than the company's capacity, which held back growth in the quarter and highlighted the need for spending to expand its infrastructure.
At Google, cloud revenue jumped about 28% with strong growth in Google Workspace, where the Alphabet unit offers a slew of AI features powered by its large language model Gemini.
The results contrasted with a warning of higher spending and
