Big Tech Earnings Week: The Market's New Standard for Big Tech — 'CapEx ≥ Revenue Visibility'

Through Big Tech earnings releases, the market's new standard for AI investment — 'CapEx ≥ Revenue Visibility' — has been confirmed. Beyond simply spending large sums on AI, companies must now show evidence that the spending can translate into revenue, such as actual RPO (remaining performance obligations) or token processing volume, in order to receive a positive market evaluation.

• Alphabet and Microsoft (Pass): They earned market trust by demonstrating already-secured revenue through cloud backlog and RPO (remaining performance obligations).
• Meta (Fail): The reason for its CapEx increase was rising memory prices rather than a surge in demand, and its vision presentation failed to substitute for revenue visibility.

The combined AI infrastructure spending of the four Big Tech companies in 2026 is projected to reach approximately 1,015 trillion KRW. This is roughly 100 times the size of the Korean government's AI budget.

This trend presents a double-edged sword for Korean industry. Memory semiconductor companies such as SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are reaping enormous benefits, but application companies like Naver face a major challenge at the AI monetization stage, given an investment gap of up to 1,000 times compared to Big Tech.

Ultimately, the task for the coming year is not to settle into complacency from the memory boom, but to build genuine application-stage revenue engines in areas where Korea holds strengths, such as B2B SaaS, on-premise AI, and manufacturing AI automation.