Meta is for long a pioneer in AI monetization, as its social network business is a very good use case for AI (vast amount of harmonized data) and the impact on revenue is almost immediate (better retention and ad targeting increasing revenue).

Its Q4 2025 earnings came up above market expectations (a 3% beat on revenue, translating into a 9% beat on net income), thanks to “AI-driven performance gains” (Mark Zuckerberg). Meta’s founder described current ad targeting and recommendation systems as “primitive”, pointing to massive potential for upgrade in the quarters to come. Consistently, Q1 2026 guidance is massively above expectations, with revenue of $53.5/56.6Bn vs $51.4Bn consensus.

Microsoft also released its Q4 2025 earnings last night. Despite a 1% beat on revenue and 5% on EPS, the market felt disappointing about Microsoft Azure (its Cloud business) revenue growth of “only” +38% (in line with expectations), while capex is 9% above expectations in the period. In a business which is capacity constrained, it is only reflecting the company’s capacity allocation (on its internal projects/OpenAI vs clients) and does not worry us particularly.

Capex-wise, Meta increased its 2026 capex guidance to $115-135Bn$ (vs a $111Bn consensus expectations), while Microsoft did not comment on 2026 perspective, but the 9% above-consensus level on Q4 figures suggests the dynamic is still underestimated.

Meta is up +9% and Microsoft -7% down in after hours, as the market likes to see capex translating in visible short term additional revenue and profits. Taking a step back, we see these earnings release as very positive on the monetization path (in absolute terms, Microsoft is growing revenue by +17% and Meta by +24% at group level!).

The news on capex is the largest positive for AI Accelerators, as the AI hardware ecosystem (on which the AMC is focused) is set to benefit from the acceleration of capex. The trend is strong, while investors enthusiasm has, in our view, cooled down. Add to this that OpenAI in talks to close a $100Bn funding round at $750Bn valuation (more datacenters funded) and we see the current setup as very positive for AI hardware stock market performance. 

ABB surprised quite massively on the upside in Q4 2025, driven by a strong demand in electrification and AI. Q4 revenue grew organically by +9.0% vs consensus expectations of +5.6%, translating on EPS +12.5% above consensus. Data centers growth is a major driver with “strong double-digit growth”, while electrification is also very strong across the board.

More importantly, orders are exploding on the upside (+32% organic growth), more than 20% above expectations, thanks to a combination of high demand in many sectors and of several large (superior to $100mn) orders in data centers and also in automation. The outlook for the next quarters is thus very positive. The group also announced a new buyback of $2.4Bn.  

These very good earnings reflect the upward inflection in demand for electrical equipment driven by the current acceleration across the energy value chain. The read across for electrification players is very positive. The market did not miss that, as ABB is up +10%, Siemens Energy +3.8%, Legrand +3.4% and Scheider Electric +3.0% at the time of writing.