Combined, they devoted $130.65 billion to 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.
Amazon, in response to questions from Fortune, said the markup was triggered by Anthropic’s Series G funding round and the conversion of some of Amazon’s convertible notes into preferred stock. The company’s $8 billion investment in Anthropic is now worth more than $70 billion, according to Amazon. They added that Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is separate from its commercial relationship.
Alphabet did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Robert Willens, a tax and accounting consultant who has served as an adjunct at Columbia Business School, told Fortune the accounting itself is uncontroversial. Companies that hold equity stakes in private firms are required to update the value of those stakes when a new funding round sets a price.
Alphabet and Amazon are two of those investors. When they put more money into Anthropic, or commit to spending billions on cloud capacity for it, that helps push Anthropic’s valuation up. And when Anthropic’s valuation goes up, the stake Alphabet and Amazon already own goes up with it. They book that increase as profit; in this case, a substantial cut of their profits, even more than half.
In plain English, the more they invest in Anthropic, the more profit they can report—without Anthropic ever having to pay them a dollar.
“It’s interesting that they’re able to control or influence the value of one of their own assets,” Willens said, “and one that they’re able to mark to market by engaging in business transactions with that entity. There might be something to say about that.”
What makes this quarter so striking is the scale: Alphabet’s $36.9 billion equity gain is more than triple the prior peak of the number, and Anthropic’s reported discussion of a $900 billion valuation suggest the next markup could be larger still.
Willens also recalled that when accounting regulators required companies to start counting these unrealized gains as profit in 2018, “everyone said it would make earnings unnecessarily volatile”—that investors would struggle to make sense of profit figures jumping around while the underlying business stayed steady. “This, I suppose, confirms the fact that perhaps this wasn’t the best idea [the Financial Accounting Standards Board] ever came up with.”
