The largest questions going through Bulky Tech forward of profits

Tariffs are also a problem, as the company relies on suppliers in Mexico and China for items like automotive glass, printed circuit boards and battery cells, among other parts essential for the production of its cars. Tesla has sought an exemption from the U.S. Trade Representative for equipment imported from China that it uses in its factories.

On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja cautioned shareholders that the Trump administration’s tariffs would have an “impact on our business and profitability.”

For the first quarter, analysts are projecting revenue growth of less than 1% from a year earlier, followed by a slight year-over-year slippage in the second quarter. Investors will want to see if Musk can provide any clarity on how costly tariffs could be going forward. Musk has made his thoughts on the matter fairly clear, calling Trump’s top trade advisor and tariff proponent Peter Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”

Tesla’s business was already under pressure before tariffs and uncertainty roiled markets. In early April, the company reported 337,000 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter, a 13% decline from the previous year. To win over customers in the face of a Musk-induced backlash, and to get customers to buy inventory cars when a new Model Y is on the way, the company had to offer an array of incentives and discounts in the first quarter.

Piper Sandler analysts last week revised their Tesla price target lower, saying after the first-quarter whiff on deliveries that “gross margin is probably trending near multi-year lows.”

Google parent Alphabet faces an online ad market that’s on edge due to concerns about how Trump’s tariffs will affect the economy and business spending.

Retail represents at least 21% of Google ad revenue, according to estimates by Oppenheimer & Co., which said that Meta has even more exposure to ad pullbacks.

Investors are equally concerned about the cloud business, as Alphabet is a massive spender on imported data center infrastructure, and is going even bigger to keep up with the AI boom. The company has said it plans to spend $75 billion this year, mostly going toward servers and data centers to power AI and its cloud business.

It’s unclear whether Google will adjust that figure, but such a move may be necessary. Mizuho analysts wrote on April 8 that roughly 25% of Google channel partner customers have reduced spending on the company’s cloud, and “we expect that mix to increase to 50% from elevated customer hesitation” after the tariff announcement.

Though Alphabet doesn’t make a large chunk of its revenue from consumer hardware, it does produce its Pixel and Fitbit products abroad and runs its services on the most popular phone carriers. Pixel products are manufactured in India, after the company began diversifying its supply chain away from China.

Meta has a small hardware business, focused largely on selling virtual reality devices. That’s not the biggest concern for investors.

Rather, like with Google, it’s the potential impact of the tariffs on the economy and the willingness of businesses to spend on digital ads. In Meta’s case, that means ads on Facebook and Instagram.

In early January, Microsoft announced it was aiming to spend more than $80 billion this fiscal year on data centers capable of handling artificial intelligence workloads.

Where investors may be most concerned for Microsoft is in the company’s expansive customer base and whether Trump’s trade policies will lead clients to cut spending on products.

“There’s not a direct tariff impact, and so what we talk about is indirect,” said Brent Bracelin, an analyst at Piper Sandler. He recommends buying Microsoft shares.

Recent surveys indicate that software sales cycles are lengthening and interest in buying new software is waning, Bracelin said. Other analysts have said Microsoft, along with Salesforce, are among the software vendors that are best able to handle higher tariffs.

“We see MSFT and CRM as two of the names best positioned to weather this macro storm as they are already back at/near 2022 trough levels and can adjust spending/capex levels for this ‘new reality’ if needed to preserve” earnings and cash, Evercore ISI analysts wrote in a note earlier this month.

Amazon’s position as an e-commerce juggernaut gives it hefty exposure to potential tariff headwinds, and not just because of consumer spending.

Within days of Trump’s new tariffs, Amazon canceled some of those merchandise orders from vendors in China, while Amazon sellers have said they’re considering raising the price of their products.

Investors will be listening for any commentary around the impact of tariffs on its online stores business, especially as Amazon’s summer Prime Day discount event nears. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC last week the company will work to keep prices low on its website, but that sellers may need to “pass the cost” of tariffs on to consumers.

“Amazon is probably the best-positioned company in retail and e-commerce to take advantage of the chaotic situation from tariffs and shifting global supply chains,” Barclays analysts, who have a buy rating on Amazon, wrote in a recent report. “The pandemic was a precursor of this, during which Amazon was able to gain share and move quicker than peers despite its massive size.”

The company’s advertising unit could be “pressured more if trade wars get worse,” analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, who also recommend buying the stock, wrote in a note on April 15. Most of Amazon’s ad revenue comes from sponsored product ads that appear in search results on its website. Businesses could pull back on their ad spend as they look to conserve costs or reduce traffic to products sourced from China.

And like the other hyperscalers, Amazon has all of the potential added costs associated with tariffs on advanced chips and other data center equipment, depending on what products end up getting exempted. Amazon Web Services is the market leader in cloud infrastructure, ahead of Microsoft and Google.

Apple has outsized exposure to Trump’s tariffs, as the company generates about three-quarters of its revenue from selling devices that are mostly manufactured in Asia. While Apple got an apparent reprieve when the Trump administration suspended tariffs on computers from China earlier this month, the company still faces significant uncertainty with the possibility of another Trump shift.

Wall Street has been dumping shares of the iPhone maker, sending the stock down 8% in March and another 11% so far this month, a recognition of how damaging long-term tariffs would likely be on Apple’s business.

CEO Tim Cook, along with many of his tech counterparts, has tried cozying up to President Trump, donating to his inauguration in January and attending the event in Washington, D.C. But investors have yet to hear how Cook and the rest of the management team plan to deal with the increased costs, how the company is managing inventory and how it will all add up to affect margins.

Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are key to the AI infrastructure buildouts across the tech industry. While semiconductors have a tariff exemption, many of the AI servers that have driven the recent boom have been shipped to the U.S. as mostly finished computers, putting them at risk of tariffs.

Since an AI server can cost upwards of $50,000, even small tariffs could have a big impact on costs. And the almost tenfold increase in Nvidia’s stock price over the past two calendar years has baked into it an assumption that sales and profit margins will keep inflating.

Investors will want to hear from CEO Jensen Huang about his relationship with Trump, given the potential importance of that dynamic.