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> The same thing happened with their massive investment in Anthropic. They accounted for $53.4 billion due to deals with Anthropic last quarter. He said if you follow one Anthropic dollar through the earnings release, it's counted in AI business revenue, chips business, and AWS segment revenue.

That is insane if that is true, is that even legal?

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There's a bit of Chinese whispers happening here. If you read the original piece they're talking about -- https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/07/31/amazon-... (definitely worth a read, it's hilarious) -- you'll realize it means that that Anthropic dollar is "counted" multiple times in the marketing of three different Amazon businesses.

As far as accounting of revenue is concerned, it would have been counted as appropriate. Else, like you, I would guess it's not very legal.

It is. However remember that when the bubble pops it all works in the reverse direction too. Suddenly you have to mark down investment losses, missed revenue, and written off commitments.

Companies can go from looking really good to a complete financial mess almost overnight when all that leverage and self-reinforcing stuff unwinds. See last weeks headlines for one such scenario.

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