Davide Semilia @DavideSemilia: "Alibaba and Tencent Just Exposed..."

Italy

Alibaba and Tencent Just Exposed the AI Revenue Gap Billions in, question marks out. Alibaba and Tencent both missed revenue estimates this week despite pouring massive capital into AI infrastructure. China's two largest tech companies essentially told the market the same thing at the same time: spending on AI is easy, making money from it is a completely different problem. This matters way beyond Beijing. Every mega-cap in your portfolio is running the same playbook right now. Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon — they're all burning tens of billions on data centers, chips, and models. The bull case has always been simple: spend now, harvest later. But Alibaba and Tencent just showed what "later" can look like when it arrives. Revenue growth that doesn't keep pace with the capex pouring in. I'm not saying the AI thesis is dead. The technology is real. But there's a growing gap between what companies are spending and what they're earning back, and that gap is where shareholder value goes to disappear. The parallel to the late 1990s telecom buildout is getting uncomfortable. Massive infrastructure investment, genuine technological revolution, and still most investors lost money because they paid for a future that took longer than expected. What I'm doing: trimming positions where the entire bull case depends on AI revenue that hasn't materialized yet. Keeping exposure to companies where AI enhances an already profitable business rather than being the whole story. The picks-and-shovels play still works, but the "AI will fix our growth problem" trade is getting crowded and fragile. $BABA (Alibaba-ADR) $TCEHY $MSFT (Microsoft) $GOOGL (Alphabet Inc Class A) $META (Meta Platforms Inc)

Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.