Big Tech's Anthropic and OpenAI stakes are distorting the corporate earnings picture

Major tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet reported huge earnings growth recently, but much of it came from investment gains in private AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic rather than from selling their own products and services. When analysts remove these one-time investment gains, the real earnings growth is much lower than headline numbers suggest, showing that the AI boom is inflating how profitable these tech giants actually are.