Analysis: AI giants' profits surge, backed by 'other income' Odaily Planet Daily News: AI hyper scale cloud service providers have announced strong first quarter performance, but some of these companies' performance has largely benefited from a rather special item in the income statement: "Other revenue". Alphabet recorded $37.7 billion in "other revenue" in the first three months of this year alone, accounting for over half of its net profit for the same period. Microsoft recorded $942 million in other revenue in the first three months of this year, and the project has contributed a total of $7.2 billion in the past nine months. Oracle did not disclose any other revenue, while Meta recorded a loss of $1.1 billion instead. 'Other income' refers to the gains and losses resulting from changes in the valuation of a large number of non listed companies (such as OpenAI and Anthropic) held by these companies. Alphabet is the largest investor in Anthropic, and Amazon is also one of its major investors. Goldman Sachs analysts wrote last week: "This quarter, the profit growth of ultra large scale cloud providers was driven by unusually large contributions from equity investments in non listed companies. Alphabet and Amazon recorded a total of $53 billion in 'other income' in the first quarter of 2026, accounting for nearly 60% of the two companies' quarterly profits and 34% of the total profit of $155 billion for the five ultra large scale cloud providers this quarter. This is the highest proportion in at least the past decade. ”This once again indicates that the AI technology industry has formed an almost absurd interdependence. (Golden Ten)