October 30, 2025 · 24-Hour AI Briefing: Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft Lead the AI Earnings Race
Over the past 24 hours, the world’s three biggest tech giants have released their quarterly earnings — and together they’ve painted a clear picture: the new era of AI is no longer about innovation alone, but about capital, infrastructure, and scale.
1. Meta Platforms: Massive AI Spending and Record User Growth
Meta announced its Q3 2025 financial results with revenue reaching $51.2 billion, up $4.059 billion year-over-year.
Global daily active users surpassed 3.5 billion; Instagram monthly active users exceeded 3 billion, while Threads’ daily active users hit 150 million.
Reels’ annualized revenue surpassed $50 billion. Capital expenditures reached $19.4 billion, primarily invested in servers, data centers, and network infrastructure. Meta AI now has over 1 billion monthly active users.
Commentary:
With over 3.5 billion daily active users, Meta now touches half the world’s internet population. Instagram’s 3 billion monthly users reaffirm its dominance in video, while Threads — Meta’s answer to X — continues steady growth.
Reels’ $50B annualized revenue confirms that short-form video monetization has fully matured.
However, Meta’s $19.4B AI infrastructure spending underscores its all-in strategy on AI. While Meta AI’s 1B monthly users mark an optimistic milestone, it still lacks a breakout product compared to OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek.
On the policy side, Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) continues to pose data and compliance challenges.
2. Alphabet: Breaks $100B Quarterly Revenue, Gemini Surges Ahead
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported Q3 2025 revenue exceeding $100 billion for the first time, up 16% year-over-year.
Every major business segment — Search, YouTube, and Cloud — achieved double-digit growth.
The Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, processing over 7 billion tokens per minute. In the U.S., AI mode sees 75 million daily active users. Monthly token processing has skyrocketed from 980 trillion in July to over 1.3 quadrillion.
Commentary:
Crossing the $100B revenue mark cements Alphabet’s transition from a “search empire” to an AI powerhouse.
Gemini’s 650M monthly users and 75M daily actives in the U.S. show that AI-powered search is now mainstream.
Meanwhile, Alphabet’s cloud backlog has expanded to $155 billion, driven by surging AI training and inference workloads. Alphabet seems to have built the first true AI-era fortress, though OpenAI, Microsoft, and Nvidia remain formidable rivals.
3. Microsoft: Cloud and Copilot Drive Explosive Growth
Microsoft’s fiscal Q1 2026 report (for the period ending September 2025) showed revenue up 18% to $77.7 billion.
The Intelligent Cloud division (including Azure) brought in $30.9 billion, a 28% year-over-year increase.
Business Applications (Office, LinkedIn, Dynamics) grew 17% to $33 billion.
Capital expenditures hit $34.9 billion, up sharply from $24 billion last quarter.
Commentary:
Azure’s continued momentum and strong SaaS performance highlight resilient enterprise demand for AI and cloud solutions.
Microsoft’s $34.9B in CapEx — up 45% quarter-over-quarter — reflects an aggressive push into AI data centers, Nvidia and in-house GPU clusters, fiber expansion, and network optimization.
Copilot adoption has reached 15%, signaling deep integration of AI into everyday productivity tools.
While the PC market remains sluggish, Microsoft’s Cloud + AI + Productivity strategy continues to form one of the deepest moats in the industry.
Conclusion
Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft have turned their quarterly reports into more than financial updates — they’re manifestos for AI dominance.
Billions of users, trillions of tokens, and tens of billions in AI infrastructure spending all point to one defining truth: the next tech era won’t be won by who builds the smartest model, but by who can afford to train it.
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