Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta all report Q1 earnings tomorrow (Apr 29), with Apple on Apr 30. These four hyperscalers are set to spend roughly $700 billion in combined capex this year, overwhelmingly directed at AI infrastructure. Any signal of accelerating or decelerating AI spend will ripple across the entire sector — NVDA, AMD, AVGO, and the memory/networking supply chain are all in the blast radius. Futures are mixed Monday morning after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at record highs Friday.
Microsoft and OpenAI announced a restructured deal that eliminates MSFT's exclusive rights to host OpenAI products. ChatGPT and other OpenAI models will now be available on AWS and Google Cloud. Microsoft retains non-exclusive IP access through 2032 and ongoing revenue share through 2030 (MSFT booked $7.5B in OpenAI-related revenue last quarter). Critically, the controversial AGI trigger clause has been eliminated entirely. MSFT shares barely moved (+0.04%), suggesting markets view this as neutral-to-positive clarity ahead of earnings. Barclays called it "mutually beneficial."
Nvidia closed at $216.54, up 4.0%, setting a new 52-week high and pushing market cap toward $5 trillion. The stock is now up 108% from its 52-week low of $104.08. Consensus price target sits at $266.24 (42 analysts at Strong Buy), implying ~23% further upside. The Vera Rubin architecture is slated to launch later this year. All eyes are on tomorrow's hyperscaler earnings for signals on GPU procurement pace.
Intel surged 24% on April 24 — its best single-day move since 1987 — after Q1 revenue of $13.6B crushed estimates and EPS of $0.29 obliterated the $0.01 consensus. Data Center & AI revenue rose 22% to $5.1B. CEO Lip-Bu Tan declared the CPU "the orchestration layer for the entire AI stack," noting the CPU-to-GPU ratio in inference is shifting from 1:8 toward 1:4. Intel is now up 120%+ YTD. At least 23 brokerages raised price targets, though the majority still rate it Hold. AMD and ARM rallied 4% and 14% respectively in sympathy.
Texas Instruments soared 19% on April 23 after Q1 revenue of $4.83B beat estimates by 7% and EPS of $1.68 topped the $1.37 consensus by 23%. The blockbuster: data center chip revenue grew 90% YoY as analog chips become critical for AI power management and signal processing in data centers. Q2 guidance of $5.20B (17% YoY growth) was well ahead of the $4.87B Street estimate. TXN is up 63% YTD.
AMD hit a historic all-time high with a 13.5% surge on April 24 after D.A. Davidson upgraded the stock to Buy, citing Intel's blowout results as a "precursor for a huge step-up" in AMD's CPU business. The CPU renaissance narrative — driven by agentic AI workloads requiring more CPU orchestration alongside GPUs — is lifting the entire x86 ecosystem. AMD has been a primary beneficiary of the broadening AI infrastructure trade beyond pure GPU plays.
Cerebras filed its S-1 on April 17 targeting a Nasdaq listing under ticker CBRS at ~$23B valuation. The wafer-scale chip maker reported $510M in 2025 revenue (+76% YoY) and flipped to $87.9M net income from a $485M loss. Key asset: a $20B+ master agreement with OpenAI for 750MW of inference capacity through 2028, plus a binding AWS Bedrock integration deal. Risks include 70x trailing sales (vs. NVDA's 23x), heavy TSMC dependency, and concentrated customer base. Morgan Stanley, Citi, Barclays, and UBS are leading the book.
Micron surged 5.6% Monday to ~$524, briefly touching $531. The catalyst: mass production of next-gen HBM4 memory began in April, delivering 2.8+ TB/s throughput with 20% better power efficiency versus HBM3E, at prices 50%+ higher. Micron has confirmed its entire 2026 HBM capacity is sold out under long-term agreements. Capex has been raised to $25B for the year. Valuation is getting stretched, but near-term visibility is exceptional.
ASML beat Q1 estimates (€8.8B revenue vs. €8.5B expected, €2.8B profit vs. €2.5B) and raised its full-year revenue guide to €36-40B from €34-39B. Despite the beat and raise, shares fell 6% as tightening China export restrictions drove a notable drop in China's share of net sales. The bull case remains intact — AI-driven EUV demand is accelerating — but the China overhang is compressing the multiple near-term.
Nebius Group, the AI cloud infrastructure spin-off, landed massive cloud infrastructure contracts with both Meta and Microsoft. The stock has nearly doubled in 2026, up 87% YTD to ~$145. Nebius is positioning as a third-party AI compute provider at a time when hyperscaler demand is outstripping their own buildout capacity. Key question: can management scale fast enough to justify the valuation, or are expectations already running ahead of execution?
