Key insights
- The article suggests that recent record EPS growth for some Big Tech companies is inflated by unrealized gains from investments in AI firms like Anthropic. These AI firms then use the funding to purchase cloud computing services from the same Big Tech companies, creating a circular flow of capital that boosts reported earnings without necessarily reflecting underlying business strength. This could lead to an overvaluation of these companies.
There's a lot being said about the record-beating EPS growth of 2026 Q1, 25% year-on year.
Then I saw this graph that attributes most of this EPS excess to Amazon's and Google's 'other income'. Excluding just these items brings growth down to high but more historically normal levels.
Searching for what this 'excess income' might be got me to articles like this FT piece that says that this 'other income' is essentially growth in the paper value of Anthropic.
As FT says:
Not only have private investments and increasingly engorged funding rounds become a meaningful driver of the hyperscalers’ aggregate earnings, but the money the hyperscalers have pumped into the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI has allowed the AI companies to sign huge computing deals with Alphabet’s Google Cloud, Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services. In fact, The Information has crunched the numbers, and OpenAI and Anthropic now make up about half of the entire cloud computing order books at Oracle, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft.
In short, these 'record profits' seems to come from Big Tech investing in AI companies, who turn around and buy computing resources from Big Tech.