Five tech firms that drive the U.S. economy are reporting earnings this week

In the next two days, most of the biggest players in Big Tech will report their financial results for the first quarter of the year. Wednesday will be Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Thursday, it’s Apple.

Together, these companies are worth $16 trillion — a quarter of the value of the entire S&P 500, according to Bloomberg.

And the revenue and spending they report in the next couple days will tell us a lot about how the economy is faring now, and what it might look like in the future.

“In a span of 48 hours, you have just a handful of, five companies that can swing the market in either direction,” said Jacob Bourne, a tech analyst at Emarketer.

But it’s not just the stock market. Big Tech can also tell us how consumers have been doing lately.

Take Apple: “Apple gives us a view of consumer confidence in the markets and their ability to continue to spend when we look at things like upgrade cycles of iPhones,” said industry analyst Julie Ask.

That can tell us how much discretionary spending consumers are doing.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s results will give us an even broader view of shopping habits. And then there’s Meta and Google, which Ask said make a lot of their money selling ads.

“There you also get a sense of the strength of the economy, just based on what folks are spending to drive awareness and acquisition of consumers,” she said.

Investors won’t be looking as much at those consumer-facing aspects, said Brent Thill, head of software and internet research at Jefferies.

“[These companies] are effectively fueling the AI investment boom of over $700 billion invested this year in infrastructure, and they are the foundation for AI,” he said.

Which is a bet on the future of this economy. And as Big Tech spends to make that bet, it’s boosting other sectors, Thill said.

“You're seeing energy, semis, hardware, infrastructure, all these names, these stocks, are absolutely ripping higher,” he said.

Thill said he’ll be watching whether Big Tech keeps spending on data centers, and whether its suppliers can keep up.