Meta and Microsoft both blew their data center budgets last quarter. Wall Street is only mad at one of them.

Wall Street had very different reactions to two of Big Tech’s biggest spenders after quarterly earnings reports came out on Wednesday.

Both Meta and Microsoft reported higher-than-expected capex. While both companies beat revenue expectations, Microsoft’s stock sank more than 6% after-hours, while Meta’s stock jumped as high as 9%.

Big Tech’s spending has risen sharply in the last two years, driven by investments in massive AI data centers. Wall Street has started to question when those investments will pay off, and analysts are giving some companies a much harder time than others.

Meta reported capex of $22.1 billion for the fourth quarter and $72.2 billion for the year, up from 2024’s $39.2 billion. That number will climb in 2026 — the company estimates capex will be in the range of $115 billion to $135 billion for the year, driven by increased spending on Meta SuperIntelligence Labs, the company’s big bet on speeding up AI model development.

“We plan…