Thursday brought a volatile trading session for software equities, as quarterly earnings reports underscored the difficulty of identifying clear winners among AI-powered companies. Despite surpassing both revenue and profit expectations, Datadog (DDOG) and Figma each saw their share prices fall by more than 15%.

Profitability concerns were the primary driver behind the sell-offs. Datadog reported an adjusted gross profit margin of 80%, narrowly missing the Wall Street forecast of 80.7%. Although the discrepancy seems small, it fueled investor unease about AI's potential to erode established software profit structures. Software companies have historically commanded premium valuations built on the assumption of sustained high margins and scalable revenue growth, making even modest margin compression a sensitive signal for investors evaluating whether AI integration reinforces or undermines that economic model.

Figma faced a similar dynamic. The design collaboration platform beat earnings expectations but warned that rising AI inference costs are squeezing its margins. The company currently absorbs the computational costs of processing customer AI prompts for beta features without charging usage fees. This cost structure represents a broader industry challenge: as software vendors embed generative AI capabilities into their products, the variable compute costs associated with running inference models create a fundamentally different expense profile than traditional cloud-based SaaS delivery, where marginal costs per additional user are minimal.

"We do not charge our customers for their usage of products that are currently in beta, and we bear the cost of inference without offsetting consumption revenue," said Figma CFO Praveer Melwani on the company's earnings call.

软件公司表现分化

本轮财报季在整个软件板块带来了喜忧参半的结果。Palantir（PLTR）在公布强劲营收增长后，周二股价大涨30%。在分析师电话会上，公司直接挑战OpenAI和Anthropic，对其企业级AI能力提出质疑。Palantir的商业模式与许多承压同行在结构上不同：其与政府和大型企业客户的合同往往将AI能力嵌入长期、高价值部署，而不是叠加到自助式订阅层中，后者的推理成本会随着单个用户活动而扩张。

Cloudflare和JFrog也公布了积极的季度业绩，并录得周度上涨。这些公司将人工智能定位为增长催化剂，而非对业务的威胁，使自己处于AI基础设施链条之中，其内容分发、安全和软件供应链管理需求会随着更广泛的AI采用而增长。

HubSpot和Salesforce则是同期其他显著下跌的公司之一。

软件板块展望

iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF周四下跌超过2%。尽管该基金自4月低点以来已反弹超过35%，但仍比年初水平低约3%。

相比之下，PHLX Semiconductor Index自7月初以来已下跌15%。在这段较短的时间内，软件股相对于芯片制造商表现出相对韧性，但从更长周期看，双方仍存在明显的表现差距。

AI投资主题还受到Situational Awareness这家AI聚焦对冲基金强制平仓的进一步冲击。这些被迫卖出在夏季月份加大了对基础设施相关股票的压力，并引发市场对价值向应用层公司迁移的猜测。

然而，当前这轮财报披露显示，这一叙事并不统一。即便是Alphabet，在经历行业对其开发路径的高度认可后，也已重组其AI研究部门。

预期软件板块全面反弹的投资者正面临择时难题。Palantir等赢家与Datadog等落后者之间的鲜明对比表明，在当前环境下，这一板块仍然高度不确定，结果取决于的不只是公司是否“与AI相关”，而是各自如何在计算成本约束下实现智能功能变现的具体经济结构。