Beyond Big Tech: Five AI themes from the Mag 7 earnings
Tech Beyond Big Tech: Five AI themes from the Mag 7 earningsMag 7 earnings confirmed that AI demand is still scaling, with stronger cloud growth and higher capex guidance — but stock reactions showed investors are now pricing the of AI spend, not just the size of the budget.Market reactions were nuanced, and the AI story is now more selective: investors rewarded clearer revenue flow-through and questioned capex without near-term offsets.Five themes investors may monitor stand out from the earnings cycle: memory, cloud infrastructure, custom silicon, power and energy, and Asias hardware backbone. A different earnings reaction: Same theme, new discipline The latest round of Mag 7 earnings was strong on the surface — solid revenue growth, improving cloud trends and continued AI momentum — but the details matter more this time. Crucially, capex guidance was revised higher across hyperscalers, with combined 2026 spend now tracking around $725bn (vs. ~$670bn pre-earnings) and Meta lifting its range to $125–145bn. Alphabet and Microsoft also flagged capacity constraints, signalling demand is running ahead of supply. The first-order implication is clear: the AI buildout is intact and still scaling, which keeps the broader AI value chain — from semiconductors and memory to networking, power and data centres —