OpenAI and Anthropic now sit at the center of Big Tech’s AI cloud backlog

The article warns that Big Tech may be inflating AI-era revenue by funding startups (OpenAI, Anthropic) and then recognizing the startups’ cloud spending as customer revenue. It cites Microsoft’s roughly $13bn OpenAI funding (mostly Azure credits) and OpenAI’s >$60bn annual cloud bill versus ~$25bn revenue, Anthropic’s ~$2.66bn AWS spend in nine months, and sizable paper gains in Alphabet and Amazon quarterly results. The piece highlights the gap between accounting profits and cash—Amazon’s free cash flow plunged 95% to $1.2bn even as reported earnings included large AI-related gains—and flags concentration risk (large shares of future backlogs tied to OpenAI). Market impact: reported profits may be overstating real demand, increasing downside risk for AI-linked mega-cap stocks and amplifying valuation concentration in the S&P 500, raising bubble and contagion concerns similar to the dot‑com era.