Big Tech earnings aren’t giving the artificial-intelligence trade much of a boost on Thursday. Results from Microsoft and Alphabet raised as many questions about the sustainability of AI spending as they answered.

Chip stocks were slipping, with Advanced Micro Devices down 2% and Broadcom falling 2.7% in early trading. Cloud-computing stocks were also down, with CoreWeave and Nebius Group both dropping more than 2%.

When it comes to Alphabet, the reason for pessimism was pretty clear: Investors are concerned that AI might be undermining its core Google search business. Even with cloud revenue more than doubling from the same period a year earlier, that has shareholders on edge about the costs of its AI investments.

Still, Alphabet maintained its annual capital-expenditure guidance of $195 billion-$205 billion, and it expects that to increase significantly next year. That should be good news for chip-design partner Broadcom, as the two companies aim to increase sales of their jointly-developed Tensor Processing Units next year.

For Microsoft, things were a bit different. Shareholders reacted positively to its results, partly because of the company’s lower-than-expected capital expenditure. On the face of it, lower capex could be a bad sign for cloud-computing partners such as CoreWeave and Nebius, but it seems to be linked more to timing issues rather than a pullback from AI investment.

“[Microsoft’s] capital expenditures came in at $45.2 billion, below the company’s expectation of more than $50 billion as certain third-party capacity deliveries were delayed,” wrote William Blair analyst Jason Ader in a research note. “Capex is expected to exceed $50 billion in the second quarter and accelerate in the second half of fiscal 2027 as delayed capacity comes online and component inflation persists.”

If markets needed any more signal about Microsoft’s continued appetite for investing in AI, they got it Thursday amid multiple reports that the company intends to issue $25 billion in new bonds, with The Wall Street Journal citing investors.

So, overall it doesn’t look like there’s any reason to panic over the health of the AI trade. But companies dependent on the continued buildout of data centers are under scrutiny as financial conditions tighten, even with the Federal Reserve opting to pause rate hikes on Wednesday.

“Some of the air has come out of the most puffed-up names in the AI space, especially in the disk drive and memory space, and these names… may face continued pressure if the midterm elections tilt to the Democrats, since a blue wave could slow the data center movement,” said Richard Reyle, chief investment officer at Questar Capital Partners.