Nearly $12 trillion in market cap reported earnings in the space of just a couple of minutes late Wednesday in the US, when investors were compelled to parse results from four of the Magnificent 7 all at once.

Between them, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to spend more than $600 billion on the AI buildout this year. Suffice to say a lot was riding on 4:02 PM ET, April 29, 2026.

Spoiler alert: Everyone beat on the top-line. At Alphabet, total revenue of $109.9 billion rose 22% and easily beat the $107 billion and change consensus saw.

This was the fifth straight quarter that the pace of revenue growth accelerated at Alphabet. The ex-TAC print, $94.7 billion, easily topped the $91.6 billion consensus.

At Amazon, sales rose 17% to $181.5 billion, beating the $177 billion analysts expected. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg eked out a beat with $56.31 billion in revenue, up 33% from the same period a year ago and the largest annual increase since late 2021. At Microsoft, sales of $82.9 billion rose 18%, topping the $81.39 billion seen.

Now to what counts. Google Cloud sales were $20 billion, up 63% YoY. That’s a big number for Alphabet. Consensus saw just $18.4 billion. The company said sales were up materially “across enterprise AI Solutions and enterprise AI Infrastructure.”

Cloud growth was of course more modest at Amazon and Microsoft, where those businesses are far more mature. AWS sales rose 28% to $37.6 billion, while Azure revenue rose 40% (39% CC). Both of those readouts were beats, but the latter only narrowly.

It’s never easy to determine what counts as “good enough” for Azure growth. If I had to guess, a 1ppt beat on the CC growth front isn’t enough to placate picky investors, but it all depends on Amy Hood’s guide.

Hood said Wednesday that Microsoft’s overall results exceeded internal expectations, and described “growing demand” for Cloud. Capex at Microsoft was $31.9 billion for the quarter. That undershot consensus by more than $3 billion.

Andy Jassy was keen to point out that AWS growth was the briskest in 15 quarters, and that “on a very large base.” He also noted that Amazon’s chips business now boasts a $20 billion revenue run rate and is growing triple digits.

The current-quarter revenue guide at Amazon calls for $196.5 billion in sales at the midpoint.

As the figure shows, that’d be a further acceleration on top of last quarter’s pace, which already counted as the quickest in five years.

Operating income at Amazon’s expected to be $22 billion (again taking the midpoint) this quarter, up about 15% from the same period last year. Net income in Q1 was $30.3 billion. EPS $2.78.

Spending on property and equipment — i.e., capex — exceeded $150 billion in the 12 months to end-March, up a staggering $58 billion from the same stretch a year ago.

Amazon’s free cash flow fell to $1.2 billion for the trailing 12 months. That figure on March 31 last year was — drumroll — $25.9 billion. The decline was “driven primarily by purchases of property and equipment [and] reflects investments in AI,” the company said.

At Meta, Zuckerberg guided for $59.5 billion in current-quarter sales. That’d represent a slowdown from Q1’s pace which, again, was the fastest in a very long time.

Net income in Q1 was $26.77 billion, which looked like a big beat. EPS was $10.44.

Zuckerberg described “a milestone quarter” and said Meta’s “on track to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people.”

Superintelligence won’t be cheap to develop, though, and I have to think investors will balk at the capex guide. For the full year, Meta now plans to spend between $125-145 billion. Previously, the company guided for $115-135 billion.

Meta said the ongoing spending spree “reflects our expectations for higher component pricing this year and, to a lesser extent, additional data center costs to support future year capacity.”

As far as I can tell — and this would be entirely consistent with the notion that Google’s now sprinting ahead on multiple fronts after lagging in the AI race for most of 2025 — Alphabet’s numbers were the best of the bunch.

In addition to robust Cloud growth, net income rose more than 80% to $62.58 billion. EPS of $5.11 was a huge beat. The company also raised its dividend and said its Cloud backlog doubled to $460 billion.

Sundar Pichai was unequivocal. “2026 is off to a terrific start,” he said. “Our AI investments and full stack approach are lighting up every part of the business.”