As always, all eyes will be on cloud growth at AWS when Amazon reports its second quarter results. At a group level, net revenue is expected to grow 7-11% year-on-year, reaching $144-149 billion. For AWS in particular, investors will want to see that the renewed growth in Q1 wasn’t a one-off. AWS has a market-leading position in all things data, and it should be well-positioned to capture a large portion of the demand from the AI ​​wave.

There was also a strong performance from both the e-commerce and advertising segments in the first quarter, something investors would like to see continue. But markets were a little unhappy with the $10-14 billion profit forecast for the second quarter, anything at the higher end of that range would be well received.

Microsoft is set to report fourth-quarter results next week. Investors are hoping for another strong performance from its cloud business, Azure. Analysts are expecting 19.5% revenue growth from Azure, which seems very feasible. In April, management said that demand for cloud AI was outpacing supply. Despite a massive effort to build out compute, that supply-demand imbalance is likely to underpin Azure’s growth for some time.

Of course, Microsoft has more to offer than just the cloud. It will be looking at how some of its software business lines perform, as the SaaS (software as a service) market has been a bit softer recently. Rollout of tools like copilot is underway, but large-scale adoption is likely to take some time.

Diageo reported a disappointing set of results in January as the group reported a small decline in sales in the first half of the year. Performance was held back by a weak performance in the Latin America and Caribbean region, where sales fell 23% as customers cut back on consumption and switched to cheaper alternatives. With the region being one of the group’s higher margin markets, operating profit fell more than 5% in the first half. An improvement in conditions here will be key to improving investor sentiment.

In next week’s results, we expect to hear that trading in Diageo’s other regions has been better. Strong brands such as Guinness, Tanqueray and Don Julio Tequilla should help the group weather price increases and help offset most of the impact of weaker volumes. Despite this, markets still expect revenue and operating profit to fall by 1% and 5% respectively.