Amazon and Alphabet just posted some of the most impressive quarterly numbers in their histories. Amazon’s Q1 2026 net income hit $30.3 billion. Alphabet’s total quarterly profit reached a record $62.6 billion.
The Anthropic effect
Of Amazon’s $30.3 billion in Q1 2026 net income, roughly $16.8 billion came from the revaluation of its stake in Anthropic. That’s more than half of the total, generated not by shipping packages or running AWS workloads, but by the rising valuation of an AI startup.
Alphabet’s story is similar. The company recorded approximately $28.7 billion in unrealized gains for the same quarter, largely driven by its own Anthropic holdings. Those mark-to-market gains were a key driver of the $62.6 billion record profit.
When more than half of your net income in a given quarter comes from unrealized gains on a single investment, it raises fair questions about the durability of those earnings.
