TL;DR: Yesterday, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon all reported strong earnings from January through March—then announced even bigger AI infrastructure budgets that push their combined 2026 capex to as much as $725 billion. Only Alphabet convinced Wall Street the bill was worth it.

What happened: All four firms beat quarterly expectations. Then, they told investors they’d spend even more than already earmarked, most of it on AI.

• Microsoft raised its capex projection to $190 billion (~$35 billion above analyst consensus).
• Meta’s range increased to $125–$145 billion (up $10 billion from its last estimate).
• Alphabet is now at $180–$190 billion (up $5 billion).
• Amazon stuck with its previous $200 billion plan but already spent a whopping $43 billion in Q1, the highest among this group by almost $7 billion.

By Thursday morning, only Alphabet shares were up—which makes sense, given Google Cloud revenue rose 63% (far above the 50.1% analyst estimate). Meta dropped ~10%; Microsoft fell ~3%, and Amazon slipped ~1%, though AWS posted its fastest growth rate in 15 quarters.

Sticker shock: These four companies’ spending in the first three months of the year hit $131 billion—over three times the inflation-adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project (and 71% higher than the same quarter last year), per the New York Times. Meta alone is now on track to spend more in 2026 than in the past two years together.

Who’s getting away with it: Company execs all offered some justification for their spending binge, whether it was the need for more compute, rising component costs, future revenue to be booked, or pitching it as a long-term infrastructure investment. But for the most part, Wall Street isn’t buying it. As one S&P Global analyst put it to Fortune, without a blowout quarter, Meta’s capex bump “raises this question about what is the real ROI.” Meta’s Reality Labs (its VR/AR division) burned another $4 billion, pushing cumulative losses past $83 billion. (Meta also lost about 20 million users this quarter.)

Microsoft’s gross margin, meanwhile, shrank to its lowest since 2022. And while AWS’s growth was impressive, Amazon’s free cash flow is now down to $1.2 billion—a 95% drop from Q1 2025. Only Google’s enormous revenue gains—and CEO Sundar Pichai’s claim that the company is so compute constrained that it can’t meet existing demand—seemed enough to convince investors not to sell off stock.

Bottom line: The $725 billion isn’t a ceiling. Meta’s reportedly raising up to $25 billion in bond sales this week to keep spending—on the heels of Alphabet’s own $20 billion-plus bond sale in February. This week was the first time anyone asked for the receipts—and only one company could show it. That bar is only going to get higher. —WK

My notebook graveyard finally has a successor

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I am, notoriously, the kind of person who buys every pretty (or even plain functional—looking at you, Moleskine) notebook I see. They pile up on my shelves with one or two pages used, if at all. The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is the first digital alternative that's actually made me stop reaching for them.

The Move is a slim e-ink writing tablet with a 7.3-inch color display and a paper-like textured surface. It's small enough to toss in my handbag on the way to a meeting, imports PDFs for annotation, and exports to multiple formats, so it fits seamlessly into a real workflow.

How we tested it: I've used the Move almost every day since December for to-do lists, meeting notes, and annotating PDFs. My handwriting is tiny, so I lived mostly in the lined small template, but also leaned on the checklist, day planner, and US legal templates. I've also owned the reMarkable 2 since 2020, and it's held up remarkably (sorry) well, so I came to this with some baseline familiarity with the ecosystem.

The Good: Writing on the Move is the closest thing to actual pen on paper I've found on any device—you get that satisfying scratchy resistance that iPads can't replicate, even with paper-like screen protectors. The default template library is vast: planners, checklists, storyboards, music sheets, grids, and more. The battery life has been exceptional. With weeks of daily light use, it's still at 68%.

The Bad: E-ink displays can “ghost,” meaning faint traces of previous marks can linger for a little while, and colors are muted compared to an iPad. Neither is unique to the Move. It's just the technology, so manage expectations accordingly.

Verdict: Signal —SM

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OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.5, reportedly comes with much improved coding and agentic abilities. It’s also, apparently, really obsessed with goblins. Per Wired, instructions for Codex now contain an explicit line (which features multiple times) forbidding any mention of “goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.” Despite this anti-critter directive, when using 5.5 to power OpenClaw, the viral open-source AI agent, it still insists on referring to software bugs as “gremlins” or “goblins.” (An OpenAI staffer confirmed that this tic was, in fact, one of the reasons why the rule exists.)

What remains unconfirmed: whether the model was trained on one too many Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. Though, to be fair, we are in a full-blown fantasy renaissance, and “goblin mode”—internet slang to describe living like an unapologetic slob that emerged out of the pandemic—was even Oxford’s 2022 Word of the Year. Still, why one of the world’s most expensive frontier models is suddenly fixated on green-skinned cave dwellers remains a mystery, and it’s another reminder of what a black box AI models can be. But it’s funny enough to consider a feature—not a gremlin. —WK

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