The $600 Billion Question Hanging Over Big Tech This Earnings Season

Big Tech’s planned roughly $600 billion in 2026 capex across Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet is the central market theme heading into a heavily scrutinized earnings season. Markets are pricing optimism—high probabilities for earnings beats and YTD gains for Google and Amazon—yet the story is conditional: stocks will need clear revenue and cloud‑growth acceleration (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) to justify the massive infrastructure spend. Weakness or slower monetization risks margin compression and pressure on names with thin backlog coverage; Amazon’s free cash flow fell 37% YoY as capex consumed 94% of operating cash flow. The piece frames the earnings cadence and cloud backlog metrics (Google Cloud backlog, Microsoft RPO) as the immediate market catalysts.