AI Spending Just Got Graded

Earnings week delivered the clearest verdict yet on how the market now prices artificial intelligence spending. Microsoft and Meta reported the same night with historic AI budgets, and got opposite receipts: Microsoft, showing a 678 billion US dollar contracted backlog and 30 million paid Copilot seats, added more than 400 billion US dollars of market value in a single day, one of the largest one-day gains in stock market history. Meta beat on revenue and was punished anyway, its free cash flow down 91 percent to 784 million, now smaller than its own dividend. Amazon raised its 2026 capital spending to roughly 220 billion and rose, because the chief executive gave payback math a utility CFO would recognize. The same rubric surfaced far from the hyperscalers: Willis Towers Watson published an actual ratio on its AI cost program (625 million invested for 400 million in run-rate savings), CCC disclosed a 120 million AI revenue line, and Exelon cut its "high-probability" AI data-center pipeline nearly in half by requiring collateral. Stephen Forte on the week AI spending stopped being a story and became arithmetic, the four blanks your own AI program should be able to fill in, and an on-air correction: the Las Vegas casino pricing-algorithm ruling we cited last Monday now has an East Coast twin going the other way.