By Eva Roytburg
Publication Date: 2026-04-30 17:04:00
Four of the largest U.S. tech companies reported earnings Wednesday afternoon, confirming an AI capital expenditure buildout without modern precedent.
Combined, they spent $130.65 billion on capital expenditures in the first three months of 2026—more than three times the inflation-adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project, in a single quarter. They plan to spend nearly $700 billion this year alone, as much as the U.S. government spends on Medicare.
The headline profits suggest that the bet is paying off; Google parent Alphabet’s profit jumped 81% to $62.6 billion last quarter, while Amazon Web Services delivered its fastest growth in fifteen quarters.
Yet a footnote in each company’s earnings release tells a different story about the origins of these profits. Nearly half of Alphabet’s record profit—about $28.7 billion—did not come from search ads, cloud services or any of its products at all. It came from Alphabet updating the value of the equity it owns in…