Amazon's Anthropic stake just printed a $53.4B paper gain

Amazon's Q2 2026 net income hit $62.6 billion, and roughly $53.4 billion of it came from revaluing its Anthropic stake — about $50.5B of that a fair-value markup on nonvoting preferred stock. Amazon's Anthropic position is now carried at roughly $92.5B in preferred plus $97.9B in convertible notes. It also holds ~$28.7B in OpenAI. That's an accounting gain, not cash: strip it out and the quarter looks far more ordinary.

The operating story is still good. AWS revenue rose ~37% to $42.2 billion — the fastest growth in 18 quarters — putting the unit at a $169B annualized run rate. Andy Jassy told analysts AWS could "very possibly be a trillion dollar annual revenue business in time." Total revenue topped $200B.

The bill is the part to watch. Amazon lifted 2026 capex guidance to $220 billion, partly on rising memory costs, and Jassy said even that won't cover demand. So: a cloud business compounding at 37%, a balance sheet increasingly levered to private AI-lab valuations, and free cash flow getting eaten by data centers.

Why it matters: Big Tech earnings are now partly a proxy for private AI valuations — and those marks can go down as fast as they went up.