Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet beat market expectations with their first-quarter results, but pressure is building across risk assets such as tech stocks and bitcoin (BTC) after the companies unveiled large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) capital spending plans.

On April 29 local time, blockchain media outlet BeInCrypto reported that markets reacted more sharply to the scale of future AI investment than to the earnings themselves. The industry is even raising the possibility that combined capital expenditure (CAPEX) by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft in 2026 could exceed $650 billion (about 966 trillion won).

Meta raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to $125 billion to $145 billion and then slid about 6 percent in after-hours trading. The company cited data centre expansion to meet rising AI workloads and higher component costs as key factors.

Microsoft also slipped about 2.5 percent in after-hours trading as the burden of AI infrastructure buildout costs came into focus, and Amazon also weakened for similar reasons. Alphabet, by contrast, was the only major Big Tech stock to rise, helped by strength in its cloud business.

Earnings themselves were broadly strong. Amazon's first-quarter net sales rose 17 percent from a year earlier to $181.5 billion, and earnings per share topped the market estimate of $1.62 at $2.78. Its second-quarter revenue guidance also exceeded Wall Street forecasts.

Microsoft posted fiscal third-quarter revenue of $82.89 billion and operating profit of $38.4 billion. In particular, annualised revenue from its AI business expanded to $37.0 billion, with year-on-year growth reaching 123 percent.

Alphabet posted revenue of $109.9 billion, and Google Cloud revenue beat market expectations by about $2.0 billion. Meta also reported revenue of $56.3 billion and earnings per share of $10.44, but this included a one-off tax benefit worth $8.0 billion.

The problem is that the market is more worried about when investment will pay back than about AI growth potential. As competition intensifies to expand data centres and secure AI semiconductors, depreciation and operating costs are also increasingly likely to rise faster.

The trend is also affecting the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin has recently shown a high correlation with tech stocks such as the Nasdaq 100. An analysis cited in the report put the correlation coefficient between bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 at as high as 0.52 in 2025, and some analysts said it reached around 0.75 early this year.

As a result, analysis suggests a structure is forming in which Big Tech companies' comments on expanding AI investment and their earnings guidance directly affect investor sentiment toward digital assets such as bitcoin and ethereum (ETH).

Some in the market also say that over the long term, expanding AI and cloud demand could lead to growth in markets related to computing resources and decentralised infrastructure. In the short term, the mood is that the burden of excessive capital spending is having a bigger impact.

Investors are now turning their attention to Apple's earnings and the release of the U.S. personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. The market is expected to judge again whether the $650 billion AI investment race is a future growth engine or a sign of overinvestment.