As Goldman Sachs analysts said in a note last week:

The hyperscalers’ earnings growth this quarter was boosted by an unusually large contribution from equity stakes in private companies. Alphabet and Amazon generated “other income” totalling $53 billion in Q1 2026, which accounted for nearly 60% of those two companies’ income in Q1 and 34% of the total $155 billion in income this quarter across the five largest hyperscalers. This represents the group’s largest collective share of earnings attributable to “other income” in at least a decade. Of this $53 billion in “other income,” $49 billion was explicitly due to equity stakes in private companies.

This is another sign of just how comically codependent the AI tech industry has become.

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.

Financial Times: Content Be97df0a 76b1 4cb0 9ba4 d1117d8d1450