What did the giants say about Microsoft's AI, Alphabet-C dragging down Meta Platforms' stock price, and AMD's lower-than-expected expectations in the conference call?

The earnings season for US stocks is in full swing. Overnight, three tech giants, AMD, Microsoft, and Alphabet-C, all released their earnings reports for the fourth quarter of last year.

Alphabet-C's fourth-quarter advertising revenue fell short of expectations, causing concerns in the market about social media platforms that also rely on advertising revenue. As a result, Meta Platforms' stock price declined. During the conference call, Alphabet-C announced that the company will soon launch the Gemini Ultra AI model and is currently testing the Gemini AI search function.

Microsoft's fourth-quarter performance exceeded expectations. During the subsequent conference call, Microsoft introduced the "powerful" features of the highly anticipated Copilot generative AI tool.

AMD's first-quarter revenue guidance was lower than expected. Although the revenue guidance for AI chips was raised, it still fell short of Wall Street's expectations, leading to a further decline in the stock price after hours.

Microsoft's Nadella: Copilot has powerful features

During the earnings conference call held on Tuesday local time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella refused to disclose the recent development progress of Copilot, the generative AI tool launched for its Office365 suite of applications.

However, later on, Nadella listed the features of Copilot.

Nadella stated that the most popular feature of the software is the ability to provide summaries of documents or meeting records.

In addition, users can also use Copilot to draft documents and emails and interact with Copilot through chat to "powerfully" search their document database.

Furthermore, Copilot can also perform more complex tasks with just natural language prompts, such as converting Word documents to PowerPoint documents.

Microsoft provides optimistic guidance and predicts continued dominance in the cloud computing field

During the conference call, Microsoft provided relatively optimistic guidance. By business segment,

For the Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office and other software, Microsoft expects revenue to be between $19.3 billion and $19.6 billion, a year-on-year growth of 10%-12%, slightly higher than the Wall Street consensus of $19.4 billion.

For the Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure, Microsoft expects revenue to be between $26 billion and $26.3 billion, a year-on-year growth of 18%-19%, higher than the market's expected $25.9 billion.Microsoft expects that, based on fixed exchange rates, Azure revenue in the first quarter will increase by 28% year-on-year, matching the growth rate of the fourth quarter of last year and exceeding Wall Street's expectations by about one percentage point.

Despite the cloud division's guidance being better than Wall Street's expectations, Microsoft's stock price still fell slightly after hours.

As for the personal computing division, which includes gaming, Windows, and Surface hardware, Microsoft expects revenue to be between $14.7 billion and $15.1 billion, with a year-on-year growth of 11% to 14%, but lower than the market's expectation of $15.4 billion, partly due to continued weak PC demand.

Amy Hood, Microsoft's CFO, said on a conference call that the company expects capital expenditures for the quarter in March to increase significantly.

She also stated that despite increased investment in cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure, the operating profit margin for the full fiscal year 2024 is expected to increase by one to two percentage points.

Hood also pointed out that Microsoft's employee headcount at the end of the fourth quarter decreased by about 2% compared to the same period last year.

Alphabet-C's fourth-quarter advertising revenue fell short of expectations, putting pressure on Meta Platforms and other social media stocks.

According to the latest financial report, Alphabet-C's parent company, Alphabet, had slightly lower advertising growth in the fourth quarter than expected by Wall Street.

Although Alphabet's overall performance in the fourth quarter exceeded expectations, its advertising revenue of $65.5 billion was several hundred million dollars less than Wall Street's expectations.

The issue mainly arose in Alphabet-C's Google Network division, which had revenue of $8.3 billion in the fourth quarter, a decrease of about 2% compared to the same period last year.

This has raised concerns in the market about the broader digital advertising environment, causing social media stocks to decline in the late trading session on Tuesday.

Meta Platforms, one of Alphabet-C's main competitors in the digital advertising field, fell 2.4% after hours.

Among smaller social networking platforms, Snap fell 3.1% and Pinterest fell 2.4%.

Alphabet-C will soon launch the Gemini Ultra AI model.

Alphabet-C CEO Sundar Pichai said on the earnings conference call that the company will soon launch the Gemini Ultra AI model and is testing the Gemini AI search function, hoping to use the Gemini AI model to support advertising products.He also stated that YouTube is a key driver of Alphabet-C's subscription revenue, with Google One approaching nearly 100 million subscribers.

Alphabet-C's Q1 Severance Costs Reach $700 Million

During the conference call, Ruth Porat, President and CFO of Alphabet-C, announced that the severance-related expenses for Alphabet in the first quarter were approximately $700 million.

She also mentioned that Alphabet will be conducting cross-department talent redeployment internally.

After Porat's remarks, Alphabet's stock price fell by nearly 7% in after-hours trading.

AMD Raises Guidance for AI Chips, But It's Not Enough for Wall Street

On Tuesday evening, AMD CEO Lisa Su stated during the conference call that the company expects revenue from its data center GPU products to exceed $3.5 billion in 2024, with a year-on-year growth rate of over 75%.

Although AMD has raised its own expectations, Wall Street has even higher expectations for this chip giant.

Wolfe Research analyst Chris Caso stated that Wall Street predicts this number to reach $8 billion.

"Our customers have responded very positively to the MI300 (data center GPU), and we are actively increasing production to support dozens of cloud, enterprise, and supercomputing customers deploying Instinct accelerators," said Lisa Su. Three months ago, Su predicted that MI300 revenue would exceed $2 billion this year.

AMD's fourth-quarter performance announced on Tuesday roughly met expectations, but the guidance for the first quarter was slightly disappointing. After the earnings report was released, AMD's stock price fell by over 6%.

In Q4, AMD's Data Center Division Expands Faster Than Intel

In the data center server processor market, AMD is still competing with Intel for market share.

AMD's data center division revenue grew by 38% in the fourth quarter of last year, reaching $2.3 billion.

In comparison, according to Intel's financial report released last week, the revenue of its data center and AI division decreased by 10% to $4 billion in the fourth quarter.