New Delhi, July 31 -- The latest Big Tech earnings brought plenty of fireworks. In midday trading on Thursday, Microsoft stock had surged 17% while Meta Platforms shares had sunk 9%.

Both companies are spending well over a hundred billion dollars this year on capital expenditures for new artificial-intelligence data centers. And both companies are seeing increased sales growth that is beating Wall Street expectations-a sign that there has been a return on all that investment.

But in the current market, none of that really matters. Thursday's stock reaction came down to one story-cash flow and capital expenditure spending. On that front, Microsoft and Meta had very different things to say.

In the latest quarter, Meta's cash flow was nea...