This week in tech: Surges at Alphabet, Meta, Intel; Microsoft's growing AI spend

investing.com:

Investing.com — Here is your weekly Pro Recap on the biggest headlines out of tech this week: huge earnings beats at Alphabet, Meta, and Intel — and a spending warning from Microsoft.

InvestingPro subscribers get tech headlines like these in real time. Never miss another market-moving alert.

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares were riding high afterthe search giant said Tuesday that it earned $1.44 per share on a top line of $74.6 billion in the second quarter, driven by advertising growth and robust performance in its cloud business.

Analysts polled by Investing.com had expected EPS of $1.34 on revenue of $72.82B.

Google Advertising climbed 3.2%, to $44.68B, with Google Search & other rising 4.8% to $40.69B; Google Cloud was up 28%, to $8.03B, ahead of analyst estimates of $7.87B.

The company also said CFO Ruth Porat will assume a newly created role of chief investment officer, starting in September, which will put her in charge of Alphabet’s «Other Bets» investments.

After the results, research firm Bernstein highlighted the Search beat and «solid progress» on the AI front, commenting: «A clean quarter. Balanced risk/reward from here for a company steadily improving top-line while all-in on an expensive AI endeavor.»

Goldman Sachs hiked the price target by $12 to $152 per share on Buy-rated GOOGL stock, writing:

While some questions remain around AI’s impact on core products or cost structure, we continue to see Alphabet as a leader that is well positioned to capitalize on a consumer/enterprise computing shift across multiple platforms/products.

GOOGL shares closed the week up 9% to $132.58.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) beat on earnings for the second quarter, but shares lost ground after the company warned that