9AM Hour: Microsoft Soars, Meta Tumbles, Starbucks and Arm CEOs 7/30/26

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The board recommends approving...

Carl Quintanilla (0:01)

Regarding that seat on the committee, we're promoting...

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to most quarterly earnings...

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Carl Quintanilla (1:00)

Market moving insight and analysis. Join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Good Thursday morning.

Sara Eisen (1:10)

Welcome to Squawk on the Street.

Carl Quintanilla (1:11)

I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. It is a wild mix of news this morning with the long bonds reaction to the Fed chair, Meta and Microsoft earnings, the US renewing strikes on Iran. And now our first look at Q2 GDP, 1.5 is a disappointment while CorePCE runs 3.3, still the second highest read in almost two years. Brent's holding 90 as we have eyes on what's now confirmed to be a drone attack on this port in Egypt.

Our roadmap though begins with mega tech earnings, Microsoft's up sharply while Meta shares taking a hit, AI spending guidance playing a role in both cases.

David Faber (1:46)

Starbucks is going to be amongst today's biggest gainers, at least so far, it raised its full year outlook and also posted a jump in quarterly sales. Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is going to join us just a few minutes from now. Also ahead, we're going to be joined by Arm CEO Rene Haas, Chip Designers Results Driven Higher. Of course, why? Well, a surge in AI demand.

Carl Quintanilla (2:08)

Let's begin with this wild ride from markets from yesterday's Fed-fueled sell-off to this morning's AI trade. Microsoft's up on this quarterly beat and the CapEx guidance, Meta under pressure on the revenue miss amid a rise in AI spending. Here's what Zuckerberg had to say on the call about monetizing compute.

Mark Zuckerberg (2:24)

I also think it would be foolish to basically just sell all of the compute and take a short-term profit. But when you have the opportunity to build intelligence on top of it, which will be a multiple and that compounds the value of the compute on top of that.

So I think the answer is what we're doing, which is to basically use a lot of our capital to build out compute, having confidence that we have the ability to monetize the compute directly when that makes sense.

Carl Quintanilla (2:57)

Jim 528, we're going to be awfully close to the lows of March.

Mark Zuckerberg (3:02)

Yeah.

Jim Cramer (3:02)

Look, I think that Meta, that was when he was musing. He's done those musing calls periodically, where he's just saying, I could do this, I could do that, one's good, one's bad. In the meantime, how much do you want to lose in Ray-Bans?

You want to spend 4.62 billion reality labs and 431 million in Revsback. The cumulative losses there are $80 billion. David, I just think you don't get to monetize with advertising. It just doesn't work. I think that Meta, which had been a top idea for this market, has fallen and Microsoft has really just become number one.

David Faber (3:43)

That's an odd series of events.

Jim Cramer (3:46)

It has. Look, the Microsoft call was fantastic.

Sara Eisen (3:49)

You call it a tour de force.

Jim Cramer (3:51)

Because Azure is extraordinary.

David Faber (3:53)

So it's turned you around on the stock?

Jim Cramer (3:55)

Absolutely. How could you not co-pilot this 30 million seats? They own a distribution system which AI can be sold through 365 windows, get up the commercial backlog was 1078 billion. Yes.

It was a really good quarter. It surprised me and I think we have to stop thinking about this as some also ran software stock.

Carl Quintanilla (4:17)

Got some equity gains in there too for the full year.