While AI spending is top of mind, online ads are driving a lot of Big Tech’s growth

As tech giants increase their already breathtaking spending on artificial intelligence, their respective digital advertising businesses have also gained momentum.

Quarterly earnings reports this week from Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft all showed healthy revenue on the ads front.

The rising online advertising sales have allayed concerns earlier this year that economic turbulence, amplified by President Donald Trump’s trade policies, would negatively impact ad budgets.  

“I think the digital ad market is strong,” said Jasmine Enberg, co-founder of Scalable, a creator economy media firm. “I think this economic instability and volatility is kind of priced in for a lot of people at this point; sort of seems to be the status quo.”

Meta topped its rivals for the quarter with the fastest ad-related sales growth.

The company’s total third-quarter revenue, of which 98% is derived from online ads, jumped 26% year-over-year to $51.24 billion, the company’s highest sales since the first quarter of 2024.

Revenue in Amazon’s online ad unit soared 24% year-over-year to $17.7 billion, representing a faster growth rate than the company’s AWS cloud computing unit, which saw sales rise 20%.

CEO Andy Jassy highlighted on Amazon’s earnings call that the company is continuing to expand its ad-specific demand-side platform to more third-party apps and sites.

“You look at some of the partnerships that we’ve done, the Roku partnership gives us the largest connected TV footprint in the U.S.,” Jassy said. “And you layer on top of that what we’ve recently done in providing our DSP customers the opportunity to integrate with the ad inventory in Netflix and Spotify and SiriusXM, it’s powerful.”

Alphabet’s overall advertising sales for the third quarter came in at $74.18 billion, a 13% increase from $65.85 billion a year ago. Third-quarter online ad sales for YouTube rose 15% to $10.26 billion.

Microsoft’s search and news advertising unit brought in $3.7 billion in the company’s fiscal first quarter, a 14% increase from the $3.2 billion it recorded the previous year.

Even if there’s been some pullback in ad budgets due to economic uncertainty, it’s likely that companies shifted some of that spending from traditional businesses like newspapers to digital ad platforms, said Jeremy Goldman, senior director of content at Emarketer.  

“I think what could be happening is more of a no-brainer,” Goldman said. “To put your money in social, and to put your money in retail media and to put your money in search ad spending.”

It wasn’t just the megacaps that showed hefty online ad growth this week.

Reddit on Thursday reported a 68% jump in third-quarter sales, soaring past analyst estimates. The company said global daily active uniques grew 19% year-over-year to 116 million, surpassing estimates of 114 million.

Snap and Pinterest are scheduled to report results next week.

Going big on AI

The tech giants all made clear that they don’t see any broader economic concerns that would warrant a reduction in their AI spending, and instead lifted their guidance for capital expenditures, despite concerns of a bubble.

Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft collectively expect capex spending above $380 billion this year, which is still a fraction of the $1 trillion worth of data center and cloud computing deals that OpenAI has recently announced with its partners like Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom.

But while investors cheered Amazon and Google, they were less thrilled with Microsoft, and especially Meta.

The Facebook parent’s stock tanked 11% on Thursday after the company said it would raise the low end of its capex guidance to between $70 billion and $72 billion from the prior range of $66 billion to $72 billion.

Oppenheimer analysts downgraded Meta stock to the equivalent of a hold from buy, because they said it’s less obvious how the social media company will benefit from its AI investments relative to its big tech rivals that also operate cloud computing services.

“Significant investment in Superintelligence despite unknown revenue opportunity mirrors 2021/2022 Metaverse spending,” the Oppenheimer analysts wrote, contrasting the company’s big AI spending related to its Superintelligence Labs to its money-losing Reality Labs division, which makes virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.

Susan Li, Meta’s finance chief, said Wednesday during a follow-up earnings call that it’s important for the company to invest in AI-related data center and third-party cloud computing services or risk falling behind, echoing similar comments made by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The highest priority for the company is investing our resources to position ourselves as a leader in AI,” Li said. “That means that I think for the immediate period of time ahead of us, we could see some financial pressure during which our operating profit could be lumpy.”

Meta has continued to point to how its AI investments are improving its online advertising business, but it’s having a more difficult time showing how that spending will benefit the company in the future, Enberg said.

“I think part of that is that we’ve heard the story now quarter after quarter that it is able to integrate AI into its ad business and use that as a growth engine,” Enberg said.  “What comes next is harder to articulate, and far less tangible for investors and other people who follow the space.”

Still, Meta is experiencing some growth in new products like the Meta AI app that contains the Vibes AI-powered short video service, Goldman said.

The company can also still expand more into subscriptions or even potentially offer enterprise AI services to sell to corporations, which is “an area that they haven’t played at all,” he said.

For now, Meta’s digital advertising unit remains its core business, and just like previous quarters, it’s unclear how the economy will impact ad budgets.

With the holiday season approaching, all eyes will be focused on whether the lingering economic concerns or tariff-related price hikes lead to consumers curbing their spending, which could impact corporate marketing campaigns.  

“The next test will be when we get to the Black Friday numbers,” Goldman said. “Are those going to be below expectations?”

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