![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2235448475-e1777541447171.jpg?w=2048\")
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Good morning.<\/strong> And you thought the dollar figures being tossed around by the big banks this quarter were impressive? Prepare to be blown away by the budgets of Big Tech. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all reported earnings yesterday, collectively estimating they will invest up to $665 billion in AI this year, almost 75% more than the $381 billion they spent in 2025. Some takeaways:<\/p>\n Spending is still surging.<\/strong> Banks profited nicely this quarter from investors trading like frenzied night-clubbers wondering if the party\u2019s about to end. Now it\u2019s the tech bros that are flashing Benjamins. (Fun fact: it would take a 413-mile stack of $100 bills to fund that $665-billion capital expenditure budget\u2014according to my agent.) And the projected return on that investment? Good question. My colleague Shawn Tully points out that the expensive hardware fueling AI goes obsolete at lightning speed. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar reportedly wants more discipline over spending at her company, which is careening towards a trillion-dollar valuation with nary a penny of profit in sight.<\/p>\n Cloud is king.<\/strong> Amazon traded higher yesterday, thanks to solid cloud demand. You know what else a strong public cloud business does? It gives you a way to resell excess computing capacity if, say, AI demand softens. That may be one reason why Meta stock fell yesterday. (It signed a $10 billion cloud deal with Google last year, and reported that \u201cinternet disruptions in Iran\u201d curbed growth.) Alphabet\u2019s profits were up by 81%, in part due to the fastest rate of cloud revenue growth since 2020. At Microsoft, Azure cloud growth was 40%.<\/p>\n Hope springs eternal. <\/strong>Or maybe there will be blood. Am I mixing my metaphors? Proof of a human in the loop. The volume of spending and revenue from these folks is staggering. So, too, could be the potential. Investors largely shrugged, perhaps because they\u2019ve already invested a lot of their capital and their hopes in these folks. Oh, and there was a Fed meeting yesterday, not to mention higher oil prices, and other signs that AI alone is not the magic elixir to growth.<\/p>\n Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com<\/em><\/p>\n Starbucks is winning again<\/b><\/p>\n Starbucks credited more staffing in stores and enhanced employee benefits for <\/span>quarterly sales growth that blew past Wall Street\u2019s expectations<\/span>. Starbucks COO Mike Grams told <\/span>Fortune<\/span><\/i>: \u201cIt really comes from the coffee houses and the partners who empower them, which has been a focal point of this turnaround all along.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Defying Trump one last time<\/b><\/p>\n The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady in the range of 3.5% to 3.75%, <\/span>defying President Trump\u2019s demand to lower them<\/span> in what was likely Chairman Jerome Powell\u2019s final policy decision. Kevin Warsh, Trump\u2019s nominee to replace Powell, is expected to take over in a matter of weeks. Powell will <\/span>stay on the Board of Governors<\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Nvidia CEO\u2019s jobs prediction<\/b><\/p>\n Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, pointed to one career path that he says will be especially critical as AI continues to \u201cshape every job:\u201d Engineering. Huang also <\/span>answered several questions from <\/span>Fortune<\/span><\/i> about how AI will expand the scope of human work and the advice he has for young workers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n S&P 500<\/b> futures are down 0.06%. The last session closed down 0.04%. The <\/span>STOXX Europe 600<\/b> was down 0.13% in early trading. <\/span>The U.K.\u2019s FTSE 100<\/b> was up 0.68% in early trading.<\/span> Japan\u2019s Nikkei 225 <\/b>was down 1.06%.<\/span> China\u2019s CSI 300 <\/b>was down 0.06%. <\/span>Hong Kong\u2019s Hang Seng<\/b> was down 1.28%. <\/span>South Korea\u2019s KOSPI <\/b>was down 1.38%.<\/span> India\u2019s NIFTY 50 <\/b>is down 0.63%.<\/span> Bitcoin<\/b> was down at $76K.<\/span><\/p>\n The frontrunner in the longevity revolution was born during the Civil War <\/span>by Diane Brady\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n FedEx and UPS are pledging to give their tariff refunds back to consumers, and the sum will likely top $5 billion<\/span> by Sasha Rogelberg<\/span><\/p>\n The uncomfortable truth about AI and the American worker<\/span> by Nick Lichtenberg<\/span><\/p>\n Robinhood CEO says a \u2018tokenization supercycle\u2019 is underway<\/span> by Jeff John Roberts<\/span><\/p>\n Emma Grede, who helped found the $5 billion Skims empire, rejects \u2018celebrity CEO\u2019 label: \u2018I\u2019m a CEO who\u2019s done so well you know my name\u2019<\/span> by Cheyann Harris<\/span><\/p>\n Meta quietly rolls out stablecoin payments four years after demise of controversial Libra project<\/span> by Jack Kubinec and Ben Weiss<\/span><\/p>\n CEO Daily is curated and edited by Andrew Wyrich, Jason Ma,\u00a0Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #billion #question #Big #Techs #gamble #pay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Good morning. And you thought the dollar figures being tossed around by the big banks this quarter were impressive? Prepare to be blown away by the budgets of Big Tech.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[237,1056,1411,1414,525,1412,1413],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-big","tag-billion","tag-ceo-daily","tag-gamble","tag-pay","tag-question","tag-techs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nTop leadership news<\/h3>\n
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