Key points
- IBM warned July 15 that its Q2 numbers would miss estimates, and the stock fell more than 20% in a single session, its worst day since 1987.
- Alphabet (GOOGL), Tesla (TSLA), IBM and ServiceNow (NOW) all report Wednesday, July 22 after the close; Lockheed Martin (LMT) and Nokia (NOK) report Thursday morning, and Intel (INTC) reports Thursday after the close.
- The stretch follows two straight up days for chip stocks, including a jump of more than 4% on Tuesday alone, the market's clearest test yet of whether AI spending is paying off.
Seven stocks on our watchlist report earnings in the next 48 hours, and one of them already stumbled before it even reported. IBM warned investors on July 15 that its second-quarter numbers would come in light, and the stock fell more than 20% that day, its worst single session since 1987. Now the company has to explain itself for real, on the same day Alphabet (GOOGL), Tesla (TSLA) and ServiceNow (NOW) report their own results.
It's a lot packed into two days.
- Wednesday, July 22, after the close: Alphabet, Tesla, IBM, ServiceNow
- Thursday, July 23, before the open: Lockheed Martin (LMT), Nokia (NOK)
- Thursday, July 23, after the close: Intel (INTC)
Every one of these seven is on our tracked ticker list. Together they touch almost every corner of the AI trade: cloud computing and chips, enterprise software, and defense. Tesla adds the electric vehicle angle, or as it prefers to call itself lately, a robotics company.
Why this week is a real test, not just another earnings week
Chip stocks have had a rough month. The group fell hard through most of July on worries that all the money going into AI data centers hasn't shown up as profit yet, plus fresh concern that Chinese AI models are closing the gap faster than expected. Then, on Tuesday, the mood flipped. The Nasdaq composite jumped 1.3%, a key semiconductor index rose more than 4%, and Micron surged 12% after Bank of America added it to the firm's "US 1" list of top picks and raised its price target to $1,550. Nvidia gained too, on word that its newest chip designs are already shipping to customers.
That two-day bounce is exactly what this week's earnings will either confirm or undercut. If Alphabet's cloud numbers and Intel's chip demand back up the optimism, the rally has legs. If they don't, the pullback that started this month probably isn't over.
Wednesday, July 22: Alphabet, Tesla, IBM and ServiceNow
IBM: already down 20%, now has to explain why
IBM's July 15 warning wasn't vague. The company flagged a Q2 revenue miss, about $17.2 billion against a $17.9 billion consensus, and a similar shortfall on earnings, $2.93 a share versus $3.02 expected. The weak spot was infrastructure: mainframe and related software sales fell about 7%. CEO Arvind Krishna said some of IBM's own customers pulled back on infrastructure spending to redirect cash toward servers, storage and memory chips ahead of expected shortages and price hikes later in the year. That means the AI memory shortage that's been good news for Micron may have cost IBM some sales.
UBS cut its 2026 revenue growth forecast for IBM to 3.6% from 5.5%, and Bank of America now expects only mid-single-digit software growth. Securities law firms have also opened investigations into IBM's earlier 2026 growth guidance and how the pipeline weakness was disclosed, adding scrutiny that goes beyond the numbers themselves. Wednesday's actual report will show whether the damage stops at infrastructure or spreads further.
Alphabet: cloud growth and a capex number that keeps climbing
The number that matters most for Alphabet is Google Cloud, which grew 63% year over year last quarter and built a backlog that nearly doubled to more than $460 billion. Bank of America now expects cloud growth closer to 70% for the quarter, well above the company-wide estimate: analysts have Alphabet's total revenue somewhere between $116.8 billion and $120.2 billion, with earnings per share in the $2.86 to $2.95 range. Alphabet has also raised its full-year capital spending guidance to $180 billion to $190 billion and warned of another "significant increase" in 2027, funded partly by an $84.75 billion equity raise in June earmarked for AI infrastructure. Investors will be watching whether that spending is converting into cloud revenue fast enough to justify it.
Tesla: strong deliveries, murkier profits
Tesla already pre-announced its delivery numbers on July 2 (450,000-plus vehicles produced, 480,000-plus delivered), so that part of Wednesday's report is already priced in. The bigger unknown is revenue, and Wall Street has that penciled in around $26 billion, up about 16% from a year ago. Adjusted earnings are expected near $0.54 a share. The real questions are about margins and the robotaxi business. Tesla began unsupervised robotaxi rides in Miami on July 3 and now runs some version of the service in Austin, Dallas, Houston and the Bay Area, while raising its 2026 capital spending outlook to $25 billion from $20 billion. Investors want to know if that spending is close to paying off or still years out.
ServiceNow: steady growth, a smaller stock to watch
ServiceNow is the quietest name on this list but not a small one. The company's own guidance points to subscription revenue growth of 21% to 21.5%, with current remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted future revenue, growing about 19.5%. Analysts have landed close to that: revenue near $3.92 billion, up 22% from a year ago, and earnings around $0.86 a share. It is one of the more direct plays on companies actually paying for AI tools inside their existing software, rather than just building AI infrastructure.
Thursday, July 23: Lockheed Martin, Nokia and Intel
Lockheed Martin: the defense side of the AI story
Lockheed Martin reports before the opening bell, with analysts expecting earnings of about $7.22 a share. It's a less obvious AI name, but autonomous systems and AI-assisted targeting are a growing share of its business, and defense spending has held up through the tech stock swings.
Nokia: the AI networking bet gets graded
Nokia reports before the opening bell too. The stock has been trading on a story more than a track record lately: that its optical networking gear, the high-speed connections linking AI data centers together, turns Nokia from an old telecom name into infrastructure for the AI buildout. Analysts are looking for revenue around $5.59 billion and earnings near $0.07 a share. Thursday's numbers either back that story up or expose it as mostly hope.
Intel: back to profitability, if the estimates hold
Intel reports after the close Thursday, and analysts expect a real turnaround: earnings of about $0.22 a share, compared with a loss of $0.10 a share a year ago, on revenue near $14.4 billion, up about 11.6%. The report lands the same week Intel confirmed new layoffs inside its data center group.
- Nearly 4,000 jobs cut effective July 15, about 2,392 of them in Oregon
- Another $1 billion in costs targeted this year
- Global headcount aimed at around 75,000, after some 40,000 cuts across 2024 and 2025
Wall Street wants to see Intel's AI server chips and foundry business growing fast enough to earn the word turnaround. The layoffs make a decent case for the more honest read.
What to watch across all seven
The common thread is simple: does the money going into AI actually show up as revenue and profit, or just as capital spending? Alphabet, Intel and Nokia are the cleanest tests of that question on the infrastructure side: cloud computing, chips, and the optical networking gear that connects data centers together. IBM already answered it early, and not well. Tesla and Lockheed Martin are testing it on the application side, robotaxis and autonomous defense systems that are supposed to justify years of investment. ServiceNow is testing whether ordinary businesses are actually paying for AI software yet.
We flagged this earnings stretch last week when Alphabet, Tesla and Intel first showed up on the calendar, and covered IBM's worst trading day ever in detail. The rally that set up this week got its own look too, when Micron, SK Hynix and AMD posted their first back-to-back gain in two weeks.
Check our Intel filings page and Alphabet's filings page for the primary source documents as they land, and run any of these tickers through our Stock Scorer once the numbers are official.
