"Investing 'very heavily' in capital expenditure and infrastructure is going to be a strategic advantage over time," Mark Zuckerberg said.

Key Takeaways Microsoft, Meta, and IBM all highlighted healthy growth in their AI businesses in the last three months of 2024.Microsoft and Meta, which cumulatively expect to invest nearly $150 billion in infrastructure in their respective 2025 fiscal years,

DeepSeek. Now Tech giants Meta and Microsoft are justifying large AI investment amid questions raised by DeepSeek over how much it costs to train cutting-edge models.

Wall Street's main indexes rose on Thursday, driven by post-earnings advances in Meta and Tesla, although Microsoft's weak cloud forecast and downbeat results from Cigna dampened investor enthusiasm. Microsoft MSFT.O dropped 4.7% after forecasting disappointing growth in its cloud computing business.

Microsoft has earmarked US$80 billion ($128 billion) for AI in its current fiscal year, while Meta has pledged as much as US$65 billion. That is a far cry from the roughly US$6 million DeepSeek said it has spent to develop its AI model.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, seemed to downplay the threat posed by DeepSeek, saying that the industry is constantly changing and DeepSeek’s announcement is simply a part of that ebb and flow.

The CEOs of the two companies said the massive AI spending was crucial to staying competitive in the new field

Gift Nifty indicated a muted start for the Indian stock market indices. Asian markets dipped, while the US stock market ended lower overnight as investors reacted to the US Fed’s interest rate decision and quarterly earnings from Microsoft,

Data center technology spending skyrocketed 34 percent in 2024, according to Synergy Research Group. It is soaring past a half a trillion dollars in the first month of 2025 as banks and technology vendors vie to build out massive AI compute.

Microsoft's disappointing Azure numbers are "neutral to modestly negative" for rivals Amazon.com and Alphabet, according to RBC Capital Markets analyst Brad Erickson. Alphabet stock rose 1% while Amazon's was marginally lower.

Asia markets are mostly higher on Friday following gains on Wall Street driven by Tesla, IBM and Meta Platforms after strong profit reports. Japan's core inflation rate, a key indicator of national trends,