Big Tech’s earnings season is in full stride this week, with four of the Magnificent 7 set to report earnings on July 29 and July 30: Microsoft Corp (MSFT), Meta Platforms Inc (META), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN), and Apple Inc (AAPL). With AI spending under increasing scrutiny and investors searching for signs of ROI, the stakes for earnings reports are high.
Below, we break down what investors are watching for each company, drawing on broker research and expert insights from the AlphaSense platform. To track sentiment as the earnings calls unfold, keep an eye on AlphaSense’s new Magnificent 7 Sentiment Index, which measures management and analyst tone across earnings calls for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.
Related Reading: Q2 2026 Earnings Preview: Tech, Finance, and Energy Sectors
MSFT
Earnings Release: July 29, 2026, post-market
Investors will be watching several key metrics to gauge whether Microsoft’s AI investments have translated into durable value creation for the firm’s fiscal fourth quarter. These indicators include the growth of Azure, Copilot monetization, and gross margin growth.
Areas to watch:
- Azure: Microsoft Azure is a paid cloud computing platform that offers a range of services including computing, analytics, storage, networking, and AI. Analysts are watching the growth of this platform with the company guiding approximately 40% YoY growth. If growth comes in lower than that, some analysts say this would intensify concerns around AI ROI.
- Copilot: Copilot is Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant. The business unit added 5 million paid seats to reach 20 million seats in its fiscal third quarter. Analysts will be taking count of net new seat additions as well as agentic workload adoption and AI ROI as proof points that AI adoption is translating into incremental revenue.
- Gross Margins: Near term-pressures from accelerating AI investment, increasing Azure AI and Copilot revenue mix, and elevated depreciation expenses will weigh on gross margin, according to broker research. However, brokers see a clear path for AI margin expansion over time as AI capacity utilization improves and MSFT benefits from software optimization, as well as a greater mix of consumption-based monetization.
What experts are saying:
If you look at Microsoft's position of all of those layers of the stack, they're getting a bit squeezed in two places. One is at the silicon layer by NVIDIA. They're very dependent on NVIDIA, and they will continue to be. The second is at the foundation model layer because they're getting squeezed by OpenAI.
Microsoft is creating pricing pressure during renewal negotiations and customer frequency, where we have seen used, bundled Microsoft capabilities as a leverage point…Microsoft is the primary competitive pressure in most enterprise evaluations because many organizations already license Microsoft 365.
I wouldn't call it loss leader necessarily, but they like to give away things like Teams, their communication platform is pretty much free to use their suite. For them, the more data that they can have, the more valuable Microsoft becomes. I think that's where you're starting to see a big shift, is people are learning now if they can monetize data, it really doesn't matter what sits on top of that.
META
Earnings Release: July 29, 2026, post-market
Broker research in AlphaSense suggests analysts are constructive on Meta heading into its Q2 report, supported by a stable core advertising business and accelerating momentum in its AI product cycle. The main debate will be whether the scale of the firm's capex is leading to direct AI monetization.
Areas to watch:
- Ad Growth: YoY ad growth is expected around between 26.5% to 27%, driven by AI-optimized ad tools and reels engagement, according to broker research.
- Excess Compute: Recent reports suggest Meta plans to sell its excess compute capacity externally which would alleviate pressure from investors who have questioned how much the company has been spending on data centers. If Meta is successful, this could provide investors with a more direct framework for valuing their infrastructure footprint.
- “Iris”: Investors will be watching for any updates on Iris, the company’s latest in-house AI chip. Iris is reported to go into production in September 2026.
What experts are saying:
If the performance is bad, of course, we will pull back budget from Meta, but this has not been the case during Q2 2026. Meta has been one of the strongest-performing platforms, and this is across all the objectives. When comparing across multiple platforms, Meta has been the best-performing one across all the objectives, across different goals.
I don't think that the AI tools are brand safety as of yet. I don't think that they should be leveraged consistently just yet. That said, the Advantage+ is increasingly harder to avoid on Meta, and so some parts have been unavoidable and it's very easy to miss certain things, like certain toggles, if you are not careful.
AMZN
Earnings Release: July 30, 2026, post-market
Analysts see potential for a “beat and raise” scenario for Amazon driven by high-margin advertising and retail efficiency.
Areas to watch:
- AWS: Investors will be watching for confirmation that AI demand is sustaining AWS net sales growth rates in the 30% range. AWS is expected to double its compute capacity by the end of 2027 to support massive contracts from frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Retail: The shift of Prime day into June from July is expected to pull about $7 billion in sales forward for Q2. Investors will pay close attention to North America retail margins and how logistics efficiencies and high-margin ad contributions will impact the figures.
- Capex: Amazon is operating at an annual capex run rate of $200 billion. Analysts are bracing for potential upward revisions to capex guidance as Amazon continues to build out its data center infrastructure amid intensifying AI competition.
What experts are saying:
I think the Amazon DSP is moving the fastest because of their advantages and strengths, and some of the other DSPs are losing share…Amazon is cheaper and they also have Prime Video inventory, so they have a broader mix of inventory to offer advertisers.
I think Amazon is still the undisputed leader in e-commerce, and they have been doing a lot to integrate with however customers shop, which makes it hard to say that Walmart is going to be a major competitor in the e-commerce space versus Amazon.
AAPL
Earnings Release: July 30, 2026, post-market
Investors will be keeping a close watch on any guidance around Apple’s upcoming change in leadership and how that will impact product development and long-term strategy.
Areas to watch:
- CEO transition: This is Tim Cook’s final earnings call as CEO before John Ternus takes on the role on Sept 1, 2026. Investors will be focused on this transition to see how Ternus plans to push forward innovation and close the company’s AI gap.
- Pricing Strategy: Apple recently announced around 20% price increases across iPads and Macs to offset surging memory costs. There’s expectation the hikes may extend to the iPhone 18 family in September as well.
- Product Pipeline: Analysts predict a staggered iPhone 18 launch cadence with high-end models to launch in September 2026 followed by base models in March 2027. They predict strong iPhone 17 Pro shipments to help bridge the gap until the AI integrated cycle begins.
What experts are saying:
On the upcoming CEO transition:
John Ternus, he's basically a hardware guy but more than a hardware guy. He is absolutely involved in all the Apple products…What my point is, now that he is a hardware, product person, Apple is reinventing. Probably, it wants to go back to how Steve Jobs actually figured out what the product line or the roadmap will be. I am hoping that he will not directly continue what Tim Cook actually is going to give him. He should or he must have something which can be disruptive. Because I am using this word, disruptive, it's slightly harsh, actually. I would say that that is the need of the hour right now for Apple.
I think I would say, obviously, Apple is one of the best ecosystems there is in terms of all consumer electronics. If I compare it even with Samsung or other C-brands, for instance. If I compared it, as you said, maybe last five to seven years, I feel the ecosystem has grown materially stronger. Not just in terms of hardware, but also in terms of, I believe, the services and the financial integration and also the cross-device switching costs.
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