The tone for the AI main theme is set tonight! Google and Tesla earnings reports appear together, with Intel closing out on Thursday.

About 77 S&P 500 component stocks are scheduled to report this week, putting the steering wheel of the broader market firmly in the hands of earnings reports. The peak moment of the week is tonight, with Google and Tesla reporting after hours on Wednesday (July 22) ET. Tech stocks have already pulled back earlier in the week, and prices have already priced in that a "beat" is the baseline expectation. Beating expectations doesn't necessarily mean the stock will rise; only an upward revision in guidance (raise) provides true catalyst.

Protagonist 1: Google (GOOGL / GOOG) · After Hours Wednesday

As one of the world's largest-cap "super cloud vendors" with the highest investment in AI infrastructure, Kevin Mahn, Chief Investment Officer at Hennion & Walsh, views Google as a barometer for AI capital expenditures — if it signals a cut in AI budgets, it could trigger a chain reaction along the entire AI industry chain. Therefore, the weight of this earnings report far exceeds that of $Alphabet(GOOGL.US) itself.

Let's look at the base numbers (Q1 2026 actual):

Revenue broke through $100 billion for the third consecutive quarter, up 22% year-over-year to $109.9 billion; however, within the 81% net profit growth and record $5.11 EPS, a staggering $37.7 billion comes from unrealized gains from holdings in Anthropic and SpaceX equity — excluding this, EPS was actually slightly below market expectations. When looking at after-hours figures, remember to separate these "investment gains" from core operating profits.

This earnings call, the market wants five answers:

1. Can it maintain its dominance in cloud growth?

Google Cloud grew 63% in Q1, breaking $20 billion in a single quarter, with growth leading Azure (approx. +40%) and AWS (approx. +28%), and backlog orders piled up to $462 billion; but new competitors are emerging (such as Meta's newly launched "Meta Compute" selling compute power externally).

2. Have external sales of self-developed TPUs turned into real cash?

In April, it sold the eighth-generation TPU (training version 8t / inference version 8i) as an independent product to select customers for the first time, and in May, partnered with Blackstone to rent out TPU compute power externally starting in 2027; management expects hardware revenue to contribute from the second half of 2026, with volume ramping up in 2027.

3. To what extent is the massive capex burning cash?

The full-year capex guidance has been raised to $180–190 billion (Q1 capex up 107% YoY to $35.7 billion, raising $84.75 billion via secondary offering in June for AI infrastructure); Q1 free cash flow down 47% YoY — this trend, plus whether it will be raised further to over $200 billion and the 2027 capex preview, are the biggest risk points.

4. Has Gemini caught up with ChatGPT / Claude?

Gemini 3.5 Pro and 3.6 Flash were just released in July; watch monthly active users, API adoption rates, and whether enterprise orders can convert into tangible market share.

5. How much gain does AI actually bring to search advertising?

Search revenue still grew 19% YoY in Q1; the commercialization contribution from AI Overviews and AI interaction modes remains an ongoing suspense.

Bullish or Bearish?

Bulls bet on cloud, TPU, and profitability realization from new models. Bears worry about massive capex squeezing profits.

Protagonist 2: Tesla (TSLA) · After Hours Wednesday

The special thing is that this large number for quarterly deliveries was already forecast at the beginning of the quarter:

Q2 deliveries were 480,126 vehicles, up 25% YoY and 34% QoQ, significantly beating market expectations (approx. 400,000 vehicles), ending two consecutive years of YoY negative growth; energy storage installations were 13.5 GWh, up 40% YoY, the second-highest in history.

With such bright delivery numbers, why didn't the stock surge. The market worries that while more cars were sold, less profit is made per car. The real focus of this quarter lies elsewhere:

Automotive gross margin after deducting credits. Market consensus expects around 18%; the key is that regulatory credit dividends are being exhausted (shrinking from approx. +3.7 percentage points early last year to +1.9 percentage points), and whether margins can hold at 18%.

Robotaxi and FSD timeline. There are currently only 20–25 unsupervised test vehicles in Austin, compared to Waymo's 577 vehicles in Texas; large-scale rollout is delayed until late 2026 to early 2027, waiting for FSD v15. The timeline given by management during the earnings call is itself a catalyst.

Energy and FSD push. Energy storage is the hidden second engine; FSD v14 has already been pushed to approx. 4 million legacy vehicles (HW3), and usage rates are worth watching.

Bullish or Bearish?

Bulls bet on AI/robotics premium + high energy growth. Bears watch declining profit per vehicle + credit exhaustion + slow Robotaxi implementation.

Analyst divergence is the largest among the Mag7 — target price ranges from $125 to $600; options pricing implies an approx. 7.6% single-day volatility on earnings day (much higher than the average of 4.4% over the past four quarters), meaning the market expects a very violent "jump" this time. $Tesla(TSLA.US)

Thursday's Absolute Focus: Intel — The Key Battle for CPU's Return to the AI Stage

Intel reports after hours on Thursday (July 23) ET; this is likely its most critical earnings report in the AI era. Its stock price has surged over 180% this year, and HSBC even raised its target price by 100% once to $200.

The foundation of this surge is the 叠加 of four things: US government taking approx. 10% stake, new CEO leading major restructuring (cutting approx. 15,000 jobs this year), breakthroughs in foundry business, and yield realization of 18A process.

But high expectations themselves are a risk — after beating Q1 guidance, the stock rose 19% after hours initially, but in mid-July, the stock price retreated from its June highs to near $95, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell over 20% from its highs during the same period. Whether the earnings report is a "catalyst for a new upward wave" or "sell the news" depends on whether it can prove its execution ability to convert AI demand into deliverable capacity and sustainable profits.

The bar has been raised. Q1 revenue was $13.6 billion (+7%, exceeding expectations for the sixth consecutive quarter), non-GAAP EPS 0.29, operating profit margin 5.4% → 12.3%; Q2 official guidance revenue $13.8–14.8 billion (midpoint $14.3 billion), non-GAAP gross margin approx. 39%, non-GAAP EPS 0.20. But the market is not satisfied with "meeting guidance"; it wants revenue upside + margin improvement + sustainable growth guidance all together. Pay attention: the company is still GAAP net loss (Q1 loss $3.7 billion, loss per share $0.73), and the approx. 87x expected P/E ratio is essentially a speculative bet on "accelerating profit slope," not a margin of safety.

Two questions determine the direction:

Is the CPU Renaissance real?

As AI workloads shift from training to inference, and then to Agentic AI, the status of CPUs in data centers is rising — according to citations, the CPU:GPU ratio is converging from 1:8 to 1:4, and even 1:1, directly boosting Xeon demand. Besides this, Q1 data center and AI revenue was $5.1 billion (+22%, much faster than client business's +1%); NVIDIA DGX systems selected Xeon 6 as host processor, Google expanded adoption of Intel processors; Intel also raised the suggested price for Xeon 6980P.

How far has the 18A foundry transformation realized?

Foundry is the valuation ceiling and also the biggest risk: Q1 segment revenue was $5.4 billion, but approx. $5.25 billion was internal offset (external customer revenue extremely low), operating loss widened to $2.44 billion. 18A-P just entered risk trial production in June (≠ mass production). So statements in the earnings call regarding yields, capacity ramp-up, customer tape-out, and mass production timelines may determine the stock price more than current EPS. Potential foundry relationships with Apple, Tesla, NVIDIA, etc., should currently be viewed as "option value," rather than certain revenue that can be booked in advance. $Intel(INTC.US)

Earnings Season: Will the AI Main Theme Return or Continue to Pull Back?

Just before the earnings peak, semiconductor bear analyst Krinsky judged: broad market shrinking volume, semiconductors heating up alone. According to his report, S&P/Nasdaq trading volume was 20–30% lower than the 20-day average, but the nominal trading volume of the 3x Long Semiconductor ETF (SOXL) once hit 52% of SPY, tying the historical peak at the end of May — speculative funds are highly clustered in semiconductors. Combined with the "divergence" of index rising while individual stocks fall, high beta momentum surges hitting key resistance levels form precursors to a broad pullback characterized by extreme volatility + historic-level divergence.

The other side of the coin is — this week is the "referee".

Google Cloud (already +63% in Q1), AI capex guidance, Texas Instruments' data center demand, and Intel's foundry progress are exactly the core verification points for the AI main theme. If these few earnings reports solidify that "AI monetization is accelerating," funds may diffuse from a few leaders to the entire industry chain, the main theme returns, and the rally widens. But if it only results in a "beat but no raise," then the combination of high position + crowdedness + divergence makes the probability of a pullback easier to rise.

Will the earnings reports of Google and Tesla after hours on Wednesday make the AI main theme lead the rally again, or become the fuse for "sell the news, top out and pull back"? Welcome to chat your judgment and positions in the comments section.

Storage Sector

$SK Hynix(SKHY.US) , $Sandisk(SNDK.US) , $Micron Tech(MU.US) , $Seagate Tech(STX.US), $Western Digital(WDC.US)

Foundry and Semiconductor Equipment

$Taiwan Semiconductor(TSM.US) , $ASML(ASML.US) , $KLA(KLAC.US)

Optical Communication

$Lumentum(LITE.US) , $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) , $Applied Optoelectronics(AAOI.US)

Data Center

$Nebius(NBIS.US) , $IREN(IREN.US), $Coreweave(CRWV.US)

Next Week's Earnings Focus

$SK Hynix(SKHY.US), $Amazon(AMZN.US), $Meta Platforms(META.US), $Microsoft(MSFT.US), $Apple(AAPL.US)

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