저자: DanIves · 외국인
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구글 2분기 실적은 매출·클라우드 성장이 강했으나 자본지출 상향으로 주가가 7% 급락. Dan Ives는 AI 혁명이 3회말(진행률 10~15%)이라며 빅테크의 설비투자 지속을 주장. 하이퍼스케일러 설비투자는 멈출 수 없고, 향후 2차 물결은 인프라에서 수익화(응용 소프트웨어·클라우드·보안·데이터 분석)로 이동한다고 봄. 인텔은 미국 정부·엔비디아 지원으로 컴백 중이라 평가. 단기 변동성에 흔들리지 말고 장기로 보라는 메시지.
다듬은 글
On July 22nd, Google released its second-quarter earnings, with results beating expectations across the board. Logically speaking, this is a textbook-perfect earnings report, right ? But as it turns out, the stock price plummeted nearly 7%. Many people were baffled by this news; with such great performance, why did it still fall?
Is the AI story over? Is the bubble about to burst? However, one of the most knowledgeable analysts of tech stocks on Wall Street, Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, stepped forward and said something. And this statement, I believe, is worth its weight in gold. He said, "We are currently only in the third inning of the AI revolution; this game hasn't even reached the halfway point yet." More importantly, he said that the second wave of AI profitability is coming, but most investors are looking in the wrong direction.
Let's take a look together. And you combine what we saw from Intel with the hyperscalers, that just gives you more confidence to what we're going to see over the next week relative to cap-ex and enterprise demand. I think that's why it's very easy for investors to get caught up sometimes in what the stocks do, you know, day to day.
But for Intel, I mean, they've almost become the comeback kid. They have. They definitely have with a big helping hand from the US government , of course. And Nvidia. Yeah. And Nvidia. Okay. So let's talk about the hyperscaler earnings that are coming up next week. Um, Alphabet, the reaction there was to sell it off yesterday down almost 7%.
Today, it's making a little bit of a comeback, stabilizing, uh, two-thirds of 1%. We've got Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, um, all reporting next week. Are we going to see a similar kind of outcome where they're going to increase our capex and , um, the return on investment, you know, through cloud sales for instance, is going to show that, um, they're getting some payoff?
But investors 'bar is so high right now that they're not going to be rewarded for it. And I think the Alphabet reaction, you know, I think some one would say maybe head-scratching, because if you saw the cloud growth, you look at what they're doing across the business, and then of course increasing capex.
But as we've talked about, this is an arc, it's third inning in the AI revolution. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, no one's going to slow capex. You slow it down, you're ultimately, you know, you're out of the line in terms of AI capacity. I think the most important thing relative to tech earnings, to the market, to these stocks is demand accelerating.
Enterprise is accelerating toward ultimate monetization of use cases. And in terms of the reactions, look, I think we've seen, you know, I think investors are definitely fickle and worrying about, we say, maybe patience wearing thin. But guess what, let's say Alphabet said, we're cutting capex. Exactly, the market would freak out.
So that's why it's one where these companies are doing everything, but they're not just spending like 1980s rock stars for no reason. They're spending because their customers are moving onto the hyperscalers on the cloud with AI. That's why they're doing it. Sort of like you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, right?
If you're not, if you're not spending and keeping pace with the other big hyperscalers, well then what are you doing? But if you're spending a lot, they're still going, "What are you doing?" But it's like, you're building out the Vegas Strip in 1955. So the point is, you get one spot on the Strip. If you pull back, guess what?
You're in Reno, right? And that's how these companies are thinking. So they want to make sure they have a prime spot on the, um, Strip, and that means they need to spend a lot of money. They also need to raise a lot of money. They've been doing that in the bond market. Are more companies going to do what Alphabet did and tap the equity market as well?
I think it's going to be a wave now in terms of, I think it's also going to happen over the next 12-18 months, because the reality is, if they don't do it, despite whatever the stocks do, they know they're out of the game. Now, investors, how are they going to react to that? I would argue, see if you get Meta.
Meta's last quarter was basically , "Increase capex, do the homework," but they didn't show it. Alphabet, they are showing it. Microsoft, penalty. Each. Relative to traction. To monetization. That's the main, but still early in terms as it's all playing out. And for the first time in 30 years, the US is ahead of China when it comes to AI.
Um, Apple is a different animal from the other companies we were just talking about, and every day I feel like they're saying, "We're going to revamp another product in our lineup again." Gear, what can they possibly say that's new when they come out with earnings next week? Look, for Apple, they finally now have an AI strategy.
It's not just talk , and we talk about WWDC, it's not Anthropic. It's not OpenAI. They, they don't need to be that because they have the install base: 2.5 billion iOS devices, 1.5 billion iPhones for them. Okay, it's really about giving investors an update on the deployment of the AI strategy and giving some sort of sense in terms of what this iPhone 17 is.
It has been a surprise upgrade cycle, and I think that's something you saw even in the AT&T numbers, and it's very important for this broader market, the stock, what's happening to the stock. Investors realizing Apple is basically, they're going to be the collector. Right. On the consumer AI highway.
Alright, let's start with Google, because this is the best entry point to understand the entire AI investment logic. On July 22nd, Google released its earnings report for the second quarter of 2026. Total revenue grew by 24%to reach $ 119.8 billion. Google Cloud, which is its cloud computing business, saw revenue skyrocket by 82%, reaching $ 24.8 billion.
The operating profit for the cloud business more than tripled, reaching $ 8.8 billion. Its cloud service contract backlog reached $ 514 billion. These numbers, for any company, are blockbuster-level results. However, Google simultaneously announced that it was raising its full-year 2026 capital expenditure forecast from the previous $ 180-$ 190 billion to $ 195-$ 205 billion.
And isn't it this number that scared all the investors away? Just think about what 25 billion dollars actually means; a single company spending more in a year than the GDP of many countries. The logic of investors is simple: you earn a lot, but you spend even more, so when will you ever earn that money back ?
This is exactly the core contradiction Dan Ives mentions— you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Think about it, if Google said today that they were cutting AI investments, how would the market react ? Ives said outright that the market would simply collapse. These companies are in a very awkward and delicate position: spend too much and investors get upset, but don't spend and they think you're out of the game.
But Dan Ives stands very clearly on the side of "you must spend." Why is that? Because this isn't reckless spending; this is a battle for survival. Ives used a metaphor in his interview that I think is even more persuasive than all of his data analysis. He says that spending money on AI infrastructure right now is like building on the Las Vegas Strip in 1955.
What was Las Vegas like in 1955? Back then, they were starting to build hotels and casinos in the dusty desert. Most people thought it couldn't possibly succeed—who would run out to the desert to gamble, right? But those who grabbed prime spots on the Las Vegas Strip early on all became winners and made a fortune.
As for those who hesitated and only thought to act once Vegas was already booming—to paraphrase Ives, you’d just have to go to some other small city in Nevada. They might have casinos too, but they're not even in the same league in terms of scale and influence. Translating this to today's AI competition: if you're Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, or Google, and you don't spend now to build data centers, secure GPU capacity, and deploy AI servers, then in two or three years when the AI ecosystem matures, there won't be a place for you.
Many people might ask: what gives Ives the right to say we're only in the third inning? Let’s recap what the AI revolution has gone through so far. The first and second innings, from 2023 to 2025—who were the main players? It was GPUs, it was Nvidia, and it was data centers. The core logic of this stage is just one word: build.
Building infrastructure, buying chips, and developing computing power—that's why their stock price took off like a rocket; they were selling the shovels during the gold rush. But by 2026, the situation began to shift. Davis emphasized one specific term: modernization. He argued the key question is no longer whether to spend on building AI, but whether companies are truly using it and if demand is accelerating.
Before, it was about building the roads; now, we have to look at how much traffic is actually on them. Davis made an even bolder prediction back in May of this year. His assessment was that we are currently less than 10%to 15%of the way through the AI revolution. What does this mean? It means there is still 85% to 90%of the journey ahead, with a massive amount of growth potential yet to be unleashed.
So, if you thought AI ran too high in 2024, feared a bubble, and exited the market, you might be the person who went home in the second inning of a baseball game, missing out on all the exciting action that followed. As for the second wave of opportunity, there is a variable many have overlooked: Intel.
In his interview, Davis specifically mentioned Intel, noting that they have truly become the comeback kid. Although he added that Intel's turnaround is, to a large extent, thanks to the U.S. government and NVIDIA. In 2024, Intel's stock price hit a historic low, and many felt the company was finished, but a series of major events took place in 2025.
First, the U.S. government passed the CHIPS Act, injecting $ 8.9 billion directly into Intel and even taking an approximately 10%stake in the company. This is extremely rare in U.S. history —for the government to directly take equity in a chip company. Why? Because the U.S. realized it couldn't keep all advanced chip manufacturing in Taiwan, and Intel is the only company on U.S.
soil capable of advanced process manufacturing. Second, NVIDIA reached a partnership agreement with Intel to use their foundries to produce some of their chips. Third, there is even news that Apple is in talks with Intel for foundry cooperation. As a result, Intel's stock soared 84%in 2025 and rose another 31%at the start of 2026, reaching a two-year high.
Right. Having discussed these big trends, let’s return to the most practical question: as an ordinary investor, what exactly should you do now? Dan Ives captured a very important market sentiment during the interview. He says investors are fickle, and their patience is running thin. This is a huge warning sign—not a danger to the market, but a danger to you, because every wave of technological revolution follows this rule: the most profitable stage is exactly when most people start to lose patience.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, many people vowed never to touch tech stocks again, but by how much has Amazon multiplied since its 2001 low? Over 600 times. The problem is that to buy Amazon back then, you needed the endurance to weather years of doldrums. Well, the same logic applies today.
Dan Ives says the hundreds of billions of dollars these tech giants are pouring in isn't reckless spending like 80s rock stars; they are spending because customers are migrating. Enterprise customers are moving their operations to AI-driven cloud platforms on a massive scale. You cannot deny the entire trend just because of short-term stock price fluctuations.
Ives specifically points out that the investment logic for Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon has begun to diverge. For instance, Meta increased its capital expenditure last quarter but hasn't shown enough returns yet, so the market isn't fully buying in. But Google this time, at least in cloud revenue, showed strong monetization capabilities, so you can't just generalize about buying tech stocks; you have to analyze exactly which stage of the monetization cycle each company is in.
Finally, I want to share Ives' personal investment conviction with you because I think understanding why he is so certain is vital for our understanding of AI investment. He is not just some analyst shouting "buy"; he has spent nearly 20 years researching tech stocks at Wedbush Securities and is recognized on Wall Street as one of the people who understands tech the best.
His core argument is actually very simple: AI is not a theme or a concept; it is a technological revolution on par with, or even greater than, the internet, and here in July 2026, we are only 10%to 15 %into the entire process. So how will the remaining 85%to 95%unfold? Dan Ives believes the next six to 18 months will be a critical turning point.
Many companies are beginning to truly deploy AI, not just testing it, but rolling it out comprehensively. AI monetization models are gradually becoming clearer, from free trials to paid subscriptions, and from proof-of-concept to generating real, tangible ROI. A wave of heavyweight AI-related IPOs is just around the corner.
He specifically mentioned the company NSOP, claiming their growth is just the tip of the iceberg. In conclusion, I'd like to summarize the three core points of today's video. First, don't get scared off by short-term volatility. Google plunged 7%after earnings, but in the nine-inning game of the AI revolution, that doesn't even count as a minor foul ball.
When you like a good company and it drops because it's spending too much , you have to ask yourself what that money will be worth in three years, right? Second, pay attention to the second wave, the transition from infrastructure building to monetization . The winners of the first wave are companies like Nvidia, the "shovel sellers," while the winners of the second wave are those truly helping enterprises utilize AI—application software, cloud services, cybersecurity , and data analytics platforms.
This is the most overlooked but high-potential direction right now. Third, understand the logic of Las Vegas in 1955: it looks like a lot of money is being spent with no returns in sight, but these investments are building the most valuable digital infrastructure for the next decade. The companies that secure a prime spot on this "Las Vegas Strip" today will become the house of the AI era. next time!
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