Amazon

Half of Alphabet's and Amazon's headline Q1 2026 profits did not come from selling cloud, ads, or commerce. They came from marking up the carrying value of an Anthropic stake whose next funding round is being structured by the same companies booking the gains. The accounting is legal, the cash is not real, and the circularity is now the dominant feature of Big Tech earnings. This is what mark-to-market AI economics looks like at $900 billion.

On April 29, 2026, the four largest hyperscalers reported Q1 earnings into a market that had spent three months absorbing the news that helium production fell off a cliff and DRAM costs more than doubled. The announced seven-hundred-billion-dollar AI capex story collided with the realized cost of building it. The gap between those two numbers is the new strategic axis of the AI infrastructure economy, and it is widening faster than the earnings calls have admitted out loud.

Analysis of the unprecedented $650 billion AI infrastructure spending by Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft in 2026, examining whether this capital expenditure surge represents rational investment or bubble economics