Daniel Newman expressed that the artificial intelligence (AI) deceleration narrative is officially dead.

The Bull Thesis Validated

For months, skeptical analysts and “bubble bears” have questioned whether the massive capital expenditures deployed by the world’s largest tech companies would ever yield a proportional return on investment. The latest earnings reports delivered a resounding answer.

“The bull thesis just got validated. In a single afternoon,” Newman, who is CEO of the Futurum Group, wrote in a post on X. “The ‘AI capex is speculative’ narrative is dead. The ‘where’s the AI revenue’ narrative is dead. This was the prove-it quarter. They proved it.”

The numbers bear this out. According to J.P. Morgan, the top four U.S. hyperscalers are on track to collectively drive a “significant increase of more than +$200 bn of additional data center capex in 2026.”

Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi justified the raised guidance by pointing to “unprecedented internal and external demand for AI compute resources,” a sentiment echoed across the board.

As Wall Street digests the sheer scale of the revenue being generated, the overarching message from the recent earnings is clear: the AI boom is tethered to reality. As Newman aptly summarized, “Sorry bubble bears. This isn’t 1999. Real customers. Real revenue. Real cycle.”

Show Me The Money: Billions In Realized Run Rates

The defining takeaway from this earnings season is that AI is no longer just an infrastructure story; it is a massive software and services business. Big Tech has successfully transitioned from the “build” phase to intense monetization.

The realized financial metrics are staggering:

Capex Underwritten By Hard Commitments, Not Optimism

While the staggering $725 billion in projected 2026 capital expenditures, according to Yahoo Finance, might look like a gamble from the outside, the tech giants proved these investments are heavily derisked by signed, long-term customer commitments.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy highlighted that the company’s backlog explicitly requires this capacity. Amazon has already locked in over $225 billion in revenue commitments for its custom Trainium AI chips, alongside a total AWS backlog of $364 billion, which doesn’t even include a recent $100 billion deal with Anthropic.

“We have high confidence this will be monetized well, as we already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it,” Jassy explained.

Similarly, Alphabet reported that its cloud backlog nearly doubled sequentially to $462 billion, heavily driven by enterprise AI offerings and newly introduced TPU hardware agreements.

The Era Of Agentic Computing

Looking ahead, management teams across all four companies signaled that the next growth phase will be driven by autonomous, “agentic” AI systems that execute multi-step tasks rather than just answering questions.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted how deeply embedded these tools have become for enterprises, noting that AI is compressing workflows, improving revenue, and decreasing costs. “We are at the beginning of one of the most consequential platform shifts that will change the entire tech stack as agents proliferate and become the dominant workload,” Nadella stated.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that the focus is shifting toward AI that actively completes goals for consumers and businesses. “I think that AI is going to amplify people’s ability to do what they want,” Zuckerberg stated, adding that Meta is building both personal and business agents to “work day and night to help you achieve them.”

Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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