Big Tech's Anthropic and OpenAI stakes are distorting the corporate earnings picture
With both labs valued near a trillion dollars, the equity stakes held by their strategic backers have grown large enough to move reported earnings at companies that merely invested in them. Investors are now reading Big Tech results that partly reflect private AI marks rather than operations.
When a private stake becomes a material share of a public company's reported profit, the income statement starts describing something other than the business. Investors reading a quarterly result cannot easily separate operating performance from a mark-to-market move on an illiquid AI position — and those positions have compounded to a scale where the distinction matters.
The circularity deserves attention. Several of these backers are also the labs' largest suppliers of cloud and silicon, so revenue flows out to the lab and value flows back as equity appreciation. That loop is not improper, but it does mean a single set of AI expectations is being counted in more than one place across the market.
It also raises the stakes on the labs' own trajectories. Anthropic's confidential S-1 targeting an October listing would convert a private mark into a public price — and whichever way that print lands, it will reprice a slice of several large-cap balance sheets on the same day.
CNBC — Big Tech's Anthropic and OpenAI stakes are distorting the corporate earnings picture →