Wall Street’s question for Big Tech: When will all that money you’re spending on AI finally pay off?

A whole slew of Big Tech earnings reports are due this week: Microsoft beat overall expectations with today’s fourth quarter earnings report, but thanks to underperforming cloud numbers, the company’s stock dropped. Later this week we’ll hear from Meta, Amazon and Apple. Tesla and Alphabet — Google’s parent company — reported last week.

These companies are often grouped together as the so-called “Magnificent Seven” because they’ve driven a hefty chunk of the market’s gains recently. Until the last few weeks, at least, when their share prices have been falling.

The question for investors this week won’t just be how much money these companies are making in their core businesses, but how much they’re spending on artificial intelligence.

The tech firms reporting financial results this week will probably show solid revenues in the areas they’ve dominated for years, said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at the market research company Emarketer. 

Sales of smartphones, cloud services and ads will probably be good. “But I think what we’re seeing here is that good is not good enough,” he said.

That’s because investors want to see the billions of dollars companies are pouring into AI start to pay off. But so far, that’s not happening.

“Most Wall Street investors aren’t very patient, and they don’t want to wait too many quarters to see that long term,” said Sarah Kunst, managing director venture capital firm Cleo Capital. 

But the long term of AI is exactly what Big Tech companies are investing in: buying semiconductors, building data centers. That stuff takes a lot of money and time.

Brent Thill at investment banking firm Jefferies likened it to setting up for a day of surfing:

“You got to get stuff there and lug the coolers, lug the boards, and everything else you got to set up and you’re getting no value. You haven’t even gotten on the wave yet,” he said.

And when — or if — that wave shows up is anyone’s guess.

But for now, that setup — lugging the boards, or spending money on semiconductors and data centers — is boosting the companies that make the chips and build the centers. 

Financial reports this week will help investors determine what all that investment might end up doing for the Big Tech companies doing the spending, said Sarah Kunst.

“Is AI going to turn these $2 trillion companies into $10 trillion dollar companies? Or are they going to shrink down to merely $1 trillion companies?” she said.

The answer could still be a long way off.