AI stocks: the results of the 3rd quarter before Nvidia

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Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon invested $208.7 billion between July and September. A year earlier, the bill stood at 113 billion, an increase of 84%. Amazon spent 77.3 billion alone, ahead of Alphabet (51.4 billion), Microsoft (45.2 billion) and Meta (34.9 billion).

Over the whole of 2026, the four are targeting around $735 billion in investments, 78% more than in 2025. And none are slowing down. Alphabet promises a “significant” increase in 2027 and Amazon “significantly more”. Meta continues to “invest aggressively”.

The other side of the coin is called free cash flow. Alphabet burned $9.1 billion in the quarter and Meta $2.1 billion. Amazon even shows 42.4 billion in negative cash flow over twelve months. Only Microsoft remains positive at 18.6 billion, but down 27%.

Debts are therefore swelling. Alphabet increased its long-term debt to $125.1 billion ($46.5 billion at the end of 2025) and suspended its share buybacks. Amazon raised 48.1 billion in the quarter. Microsoft then placed 25 billion in bonds the day after its results. Finally, S&P changed Meta's outlook to negative on October 30.

Yet the demand is there. Azure grew 48% and AWS grew 39%, its fastest pace since 2021. Google Cloud grew 103% to $30.7 billion. The order books are also beyond belief, with $677 billion in commitments at Microsoft and around $578 billion at AWS.

But the Stock Exchange still punishes. Alphabet lost 12.6% on October 29, its worst session on record, and Meta lost 7% on the 22nd. The market no longer pays for growth, it wants to know when the bills will be covered.

November 5 then served as a booster shot. That day, the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.4% and $2.5 trillion in capitalization evaporated. Semiconductors fell by more than 12%. The market feared both local referendums hostile to data centers and a Democratic Congress ready to regulate.

According to Goldman Sachs, hedge funds had taken the lead in mid-October. They then reduced their tech exposure at the fastest rate in ten years.

Then CoreWeave came along. The GPU rental company published a turnover of $3.7 billion on Tuesday evening, up 168% year-on-year. Its order book reaches 132.5 billion. The stock therefore jumped 14% during the session on Wednesday and took the Nasdaq with it.

However, reading the full results slides is chilling. The adjusted net loss reached $529 million. Interest charges rose to 846 million over the quarter, compared to 310 million a year earlier. CoreWeave also committed 14.5 billion capex in three months and only promises a net profit in the first half of 2028. The neocloud model holds as long as the hyperscalers sign.

That leaves Nvidia, which ends the season on November 17. Its in-house forecast is around $108 billion in quarterly revenue. It excludes any sales of data center chips in China. However, its stock lost 5.5% on Tuesday, and Jensen Huang is at the center of a political and legal storm. The same week, Anthropic should in principle go public with a targeted valuation of $1.5 trillion. Three major investors already consider it too high. Bitcoin did not benefit from Wednesday's rebound and is trading below $74,000. However, its thirty-day correlation with the Nasdaq reaches 0.75.

Falling down the white rabbit hole in 2017, I went from avid reader to Editor-in-Chief of Journal du Coin. I like to get involved behind the scenes of projects to bring my vision of a decentralized future. A lover of beautiful letters, I coordinate our teams to transform technical complexity into human, precise information without unnecessary jargon. Between entrepreneurship and writing, my mission is clear: popularize tomorrow, but do it today.

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Machine-translated from French