The starting gun has sounded for the second-quarter US earnings season but expect the excitement level to climb next week when big tech firms start reporting, with Microsoft (MSFT:NASDAQ) among the first out of the gate on 23 July.

These results will be crucial as there’s a great deal riding on whether the AI (artificial intelligence) runners, which have driven most of the gains for US markets this year, can keep the pace hot. 

If the Big Tech company beats Wall Street’s expectations, this will mark eight consecutive quarters that earnings have topped estimates having missed only once (in fiscal Q4 2022) in the last five years.

In April, Microsoft guided investors to expect another strong performance albeit a tad weaker than some analysts had projected.

The primary segment to monitor is Intelligent Cloud, renowned for its leadership in AI through its Azure cloud platform, where revenue growth is seen around 19% to 20% in the fourth quarter allowing for some impact from AI capacity availability.

Microsoft’s finance chief Amy Hood predicted $64 billion in total revenue for the fiscal fourth quarter, which would be a touch light compared to the $64.4 billion consensus according to Investing.com, while market expectations are for $2.93 of earnings per share.

Microsoft has been increasing its capital expenditure to secure Nvidia (NVDA:NASDAQ) graphics processing units for training and running AI models, which is surely a sensible move, but keep an eye on PC market unit volumes too, which could throw off some surprises.

US UPDATES OVER THE NEXT 7 DAYS

QUARTERLY RESULTS

19 July: American Express, Halliburton, Schlumberger, Travelers

22 July: Cadence Design, Nucor, NXP, Universal Health Services, Verizon

23 July: 3M, Alphabet, Coca-Cola, CoStar,Danaher, Freeport McMoran, General Motors, General Electric, Hasbro, Kimberly Clark, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Mondelez, Philip Morris, Tesla, Texas Instruments, Visa 

24 July: Apple, AT&T, Boston Scientific, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Ford Motor, General Dynamics, Hilton Worldwide, IBM, Qualcomm, ServiceNow, UPS, Waste Management

25 July: AbbVie, Amazon, Dow Chemical, Honeywell, Intel, Linde, Mastercard, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Starbucks, VeriSign