This week: Andy Jassy’s case for hyperscaler AI capex, Elon Musk’s Twitter ad collapse hidden inside SpaceX’s earnings, and Meta’s on-again open-weight AI strategy.

1. Google Earnings, The Frontier Case, Amazon Earnings

Ben Thompson
Published: 08/05/2026

Google Earnings, The Frontier Case, Amazon Earnings
Amazon raised its 2026 capex forecast to $220 billion, $20 billion above last quarter’s number, and Andy Jassy used the earnings call to explain why. He split AI infrastructure spending into two cycles: data centers that take years to build but pay off for three decades, and servers that break even in under three years.

Investors loved that framing. Both Amazon’s and Google’s stocks rallied after earnings, which says as much about how badly the market wanted a coherent story as it does about the actual numbers.

Filed Under: #stratechery #aiInfrastructure #capex #hyperscalers

2. SpaceX’s Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter’s Ad Business

Mike Masnick
Published: 08/10/2026

SpaceX’s Earnings Show Elon Wiped Out Two-Thirds Of Twitter’s Ad Business
Elon Musk promised to nearly triple Twitter’s ad revenue to $12 billion by 2027. Instead it’s dropped from $1.08 billion a quarter in 2022 to $367 million now, a two-thirds loss, buried in footnotes after he folded X into xAI and xAI into SpaceX.

It’s another data point for the theory that Musk is great at physical-world engineering, rockets, cars, data centers, (maybe humanoid robots) but doesn’t understand software business models, like advertising, that a lot of online services depend on. As a side note: the bot problem he complained about when he bought Twitter is still unsolved: SpaceX’s own IPO filing counts bots and fake accounts among its users.

Filed Under: #elonMusk #twitter #spaceX #advertising

3. Meta’s Open Weight Whiplash

M.G. Siegler
Published: 08/10/2026

Meta Returns to Open Weight AI Strategy to Challenge Closed Models
Mark Zuckerberg published The Future is for Everyone, arguing AI should stay in everyone’s hands rather than concentrated among a few labs, and Meta backed it up by releasing Muse Glimmer and promising to open Muse Spark’s weights too. I’m not a Meta fan, but the underlying philosophy, that AI’s economic benefits should be spread broadly instead of controlled by a handful of large companies, is one I agree with.

M.G. Siegler offers some skepticism: Meta’s said this before, walked away from it once Llama fell behind, and is only “open” again because it’s convenient. The real test is whether Watermelon, Meta’s forthcoming frontier model, gets opened up too.

Filed Under: #meta #openWeight #aiStrategy #aiPolicy