Making Cents Sense

Every Alphabet earnings report now feels like two companies walking onto the same stage. The first is the Google most of us already understand. It owns the world’s most important search engine, operates YouTube, sells an ocean of digital advertising, and generates more cash than many countries could locate with both hands and a flashlight. The second is a vastly more expensive creature being assembled behind the curtain. It consumes data centers, chips, electricity, engineers, fiber, cooling systems, and capital at a rate that would make an industrial empire feel financially self-conscious. This is Alphabet’s AI future, and management is spending as though arriving second would be a form of corporate extinction. As I look ahead to Alphabet’s next earnings report, expected to cover the third quarter of 2026, I am not primarily asking whether the company can beat Wall Street’s revenue estimate by half a billion dollars. Alphabet generated nearly $120 billion in revenue last quarter. At t...

Nvidia is scheduled to report its second-quarter fiscal 2027 results on August 26, 2026, and I have reached the point where describing one of its earnings reports as “highly anticipated” feels almost comically inadequate. The market does not merely wait for Nvidia’s numbers anymore. It gathers around them like anxious relatives outside a delivery room. An ordinary company reports revenue, earnings and guidance. Nvidia reports the current condition of the artificial-intelligence economy. Its results influence semiconductor stocks, cloud providers, electrical-equipment companies, data-center developers, utilities and nearly every business that has managed to place the letters “AI” somewhere in an investor presentation. If Nvidia beats expectations, optimism spreads across the market as though the company has personally confirmed that the future remains under warranty. If management offers one cautious sentence about supply, margins or deployment timing, investors begin examining it with ...