OpenAI and Anthropic Now Account for Roughly Half of Microsoft's $627B and Amazon's $464B Cloud Backlogs
An r/singularity thread (265 upvotes / 57 comments) surfaced analyst work arguing hyperscaler AI revenue is substantially circular: OpenAI and Anthropic make up 49% of Microsoft's $627B backlog, an estimated 51% of Amazon's $464B backlog, and 43% at Google — with Google Cloud's reliance projected at 48% by 2027. CNBC ran a companion piece on August 3 on how Big Tech's Anthropic and OpenAI stakes distort the corporate earnings picture. The mechanism critics describe is a loop: hyperscalers invest in the labs, the labs spend that capital on hyperscaler compute, and it books as cloud revenue. Worth holding lightly — 'backlog concentration' and 'circular revenue' are different claims, and the analysts making the strong version are also short-side commentators.
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