The biggest questions facing Big Tech ahead of earnings

As tech’s megacap companies enter first-quarter earnings season this week, get ready to hear one word on repeat: uncertainty.

President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariffs has created market chaos this month — including five days of massive moves for the Nasdaq — as investors try to gauge the future impact on revenue and earnings for American companies that rely on imports.

Beyond the increase in costs are the follow-on effects, such as the likely drop-off in ad spending that comes with tighter budgets and the potential slowdown in consumer spending that could result from higher prices and rising unemployment.

Trump’s tariffs face almost universal disapproval in the corporate world, which became clear as trillions of dollars in value evaporated in a matter of days, and some of the president’s most vocal supporters, including Elon Musk, voiced opposition.

Beyond being bad for business, the tariff picture changes by the day, making it almost impossible for companies to plan for the future when considering where to manufacture, whether to continue hiring and how aggressively to market products.

On April 9, following four days of market turmoil, Trump dropped tariffs to 10% for most trade partners (while increasing the levy on China to 145%) for 90 days to allow negotiations with those countries. Since then, the Trump administration has signaled that phones, computers and chips would be exempted from the new tariffs, but the president then added to the confusion by casting doubt on the duration of the exemptions, which were viewed as a boon most notably for Apple.

When Tesla kicks off tech earnings on Tuesday, followed by Alphabet on Thursday, executive teams will likely face forward-looking questions that may be difficult to answer.

Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple are all slated to report results next week. Chipmaker Nvidia reports in late May.

As of Thursday’s close, the Nasdaq was down 16% for the year and 6% in April. The first quarter was the worst for the index in almost three years.

Here are some of the key issues facing each tech megacap, in order of when they report:

The stock is down 40% for the year so far after closing out its worst quarter since 2022 in March. The big story has been Musk’s many distractions outside of Tesla, most notably his work slashing the federal government as part of the Trump administration.

Tariffs are also a problem, as the company relies on suppliers in Mexico and China for items like automotive glass, printed circuit boards and battery cells, among other parts essential for the production of its cars. Tesla has sought an exemption from the U.S. Trade Representative for equipment imported from China that it uses in its factories.

On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja cautioned shareholders that the Trump administration’s tariffs would have an “impact on our business and profitability.”

For the first quarter, analysts are projecting revenue growth of less than 1% from a year earlier, followed by a slight year-over-year slippage in the second quarter. Investors will want to see if Musk can provide any clarity on how costly tariffs could be going forward. Musk has made his thoughts on the matter fairly clear, calling Trump’s top trade advisor and tariff proponent Peter Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

Tesla’s business was already under pressure before tariffs and uncertainty roiled markets. In early April, the company reported 337,000 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter, a 13% decline from the previous year. To win over customers in the face of a Musk-induced backlash, and to get customers to buy inventory cars when a new Model Y is on the way, the company had to offer an array of incentives and discounts in the first quarter.

Piper Sandler analysts last week revised their Tesla price target lower, saying after the first-quarter whiff on deliveries that “gross margin is probably trending near multi-year lows.”

A note last week from Piper Sandler pointed to fears of an 18% impact to growth forecasts for the 2025 global ad market. Chinese discount e-commerce apps Temu and Shein, which have been big advertisers in the U.S. in recent years, are of notable concern, and Temu has already pulled way back on spending.

Retail represents at least 21% of Google ad revenue, according to estimates by Oppenheimer & Co., which said that Meta has even more exposure to ad pullbacks.

Investors are equally concerned about the cloud business, as Alphabet is a massive spender on imported data center infrastructure, and is going even bigger to keep up with the AI boom. The company has said it plans to spend $75 billion this year, mostly going toward servers and data centers to power AI and its cloud business.

It’s unclear whether Google will adjust that figure, but such a move may be necessary. Mizuho analysts wrote on April 8 that roughly 25% of Google channel partner customers have reduced spending on the company’s cloud, and “we expect that mix to increase to 50% from elevated customer hesitation” after the tariff announcement.

Though Alphabet doesn’t make a large chunk of its revenue from consumer hardware, it does produce its Pixel and Fitbit products abroad and runs its services on the most popular phone carriers. Pixel products are manufactured in India, after the company began diversifying its supply chain away from China.

Meta acknowledged the negative impact of a U.S.-China trade dispute in its latest annual report, noting that an action “that reduces or eliminates our China-based advertising revenue” would “adversely affect” financial results. Meta’s China revenue was $18.35 billion in 2024, representing a little over 11% of total sales.

Analysts say Temu and Shien represent the bulk of Meta’s China sales. Bank of America analysts wrote in a recent note that Meta could face “3% revenue exposure to Temu and Shein in the US” due to the tariffs. While the “tariff situation still remains fluid,” the firm said companies will reduce online ad spending due to a weakening economy. The analysts reduced their estimate for 2025 revenue by 4.4% to $179.8 billion.

Oppenheimer analysts wrote in a recent note that the China trade war will hurt Meta more than Google, because it’s “more exposed to discretionary spending” and China. The firm warned that companies are more likely to cut ad spending on social media than search, based on a March survey of advertisers from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Where costs could be a concern for Meta is in the data center, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would spend $60 billion to $65 billion in capex in 2025, calling it a “defining year for AI.” The bulk of that infrastructure has to be imported from Asia, and analysts will have plenty of questions for the company about how much more it will have to spend to continue its AI advancements.

Microsoft makes PCs and video game consoles, but it derives most of its revenue from selling software. The company buys lots of hardware to operate cloud services for its clients, transactions that are subject to significantly higher costs due to tariffs.

In early January, Microsoft announced it was aiming to spend more than $80 billion this fiscal year on data centers capable of handling artificial intelligence workloads.

Where investors may be most concerned for Microsoft is in the company’s expansive customer base and whether Trump’s trade policies will lead clients to cut spending on products.

“There’s not a direct tariff impact, and so what we talk about is indirect,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst at Piper Sandler. He recommends buying Microsoft shares.

Recent surveys indicate that software sales cycles are lengthening and interest in buying new software is waning, Bracelin said. Other analysts have said Microsoft, along with Salesforce, are among the software vendors that are best able to handle higher tariffs.

“We see MSFT and CRM as two of the names best positioned to weather this macro storm as they are already back at/near 2022 trough levels and can adjust spending/capex levels for this ‘new reality’ if needed to preserve” earnings and cash, Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note earlier this month.

More than 60% of Amazon’s sales are from items sold by third-party merchants, and many of those sellers source their products from China. The remaining 40% comes from vendors Amazon purchases from directly.

Within days of Trump’s new tariffs, Amazon canceled some of those merchandise orders from vendors in China, while Amazon sellers have said they’re considering raising the price of their products.

Investors will be listening for any commentary around the impact of tariffs on its online stores business, especially as Amazon’s summer Prime Day discount event nears. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC last week the company will work to keep prices low on its website, but that sellers may need to “pass the cost” of tariffs on to consumers.

“Amazon is probably the best-positioned company in retail and e-commerce to take advantage of the chaotic situation from tariffs and shifting global supply chains,” Barclays analysts, who have a buy rating on Amazon, wrote in a recent report. “The pandemic was a precursor of this, during which Amazon was able to gain share and move quicker than peers despite its massive size.”

The company’s advertising unit could be “pressured more if trade wars get worse,” analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, who also recommend buying the stock, wrote in a note on April 15. Most of Amazon’s ad revenue comes from sponsored product ads that appear in search results on its website. Businesses could pull back on their ad spend as they look to conserve costs or reduce traffic to products sourced from China.

And like the other hyperscalers, Amazon has all of the potential added costs associated with tariffs on advanced chips and other data center equipment, depending on what products end up getting exempted. Amazon Web Services is the market leader in cloud infrastructure, ahead of Microsoft and Google.

Apple has tried to hedge its China risk in recent years, bolstering manufacturing capacity in countries including Vietnam and India. Officials in India said that Apple loaded planes full of iPhones made in the country and sent them to the U.S. in response to tariffs.

Wall Street has been dumping shares of the iPhone maker, sending the stock down 8% in March and another 11% so far this month, a recognition of how damaging long-term tariffs would likely be on Apple’s business.

CEO Tim Cook, along with many of his tech counterparts, has tried cozying up to President Trump, donating to his inauguration in January and attending the event in Washington, D.C. But investors have yet to hear how Cook and the rest of the management team plan to deal with the increased costs, how the company is managing inventory and how it will all add up to affect margins.

Nvidia said last week that it would produce its “AI supercomputers” in Texas, days after Huang met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Nvidia also said it would buy and package chip production services from companies in Arizona. The company said it would “produce” a half-trillion dollars in AI infrastructure over the next four years.

The White House praised the move, and said in a press release that Nvidia was leading an “American-made chips boom.” Nvidia’s plans for U.S. production will rely on the company getting exceptions for many of the parts it will need to build the computers.

Nvidia’s concern with the government isn’t just about tariffs. The company said last week that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations.

During President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports and then updated the rules to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny, Jennifer Elias, Jonathan Vanian, Jordan Novet, Annie Palmer and Kif Leswing contributed to this report.

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