Meta tanks 10%, Alphabet climbs 5% as each company raises capex spend

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, arrives for a US Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on September 13, 2023. Nathan Howard | Alphabet 's stock surged more than 5% on Thursday, while Meta shares plunged 10%, as investors digested first-quarter earnings results, which included plans to up the ante on artificial intelligence spending. It is pacing to be Meta's worst day since October 2025 and Alphabet's best day since November 2025. The diverging stock moves show that Wall Street isn't guaranteed to applaud every tech company's AI spending spree . "The market was less united on what to make of the spending plans, with investors still trying to balance the scale of the AI opportunity against the cash required to chase it," Matt Britzman, an analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, wrote in a Thursday research note. "But the bigger takeaway is that this cycle is nowhere near cooling." Alphabet topped analysts' estimates for first-quarter revenue, helped by its booming Google Cloud business, which recorded a 63% increase in revenue from a year ago. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said cloud growth was driven by demand for its enterprise AI solutions. The company revised its capital expenditure forecast this year to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from its previous estimate of $175 billion to $185 billion. …