Top tech companies start to make big profits on AI as rest of the world rushes to spend money

We already know big tech companies make a crazy amount of money. But now get ready for figures that are not just crazy, they are unbelievable. At least that is the impression we get when we look at the quarterly results posted by Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Samsung last night. All thanks to AI because while these companies earn, the rest of world is, metaphorically speaking, burning money to get access to AI tools and services.

Surprisingly, at the moment AI is not helping OpenAI or Anthropic. They too are burning money as they chase customers and try to dominate each other with best possible AI. Instead, the beneficiaries are companies like Google and Samsung that provide the AI infrastructure.

That showed up last night as these companies declared their quarterly financial results. Google, or rather parent company Alphabet, announced that its quarterly revenue for Q1, 2026 was nearly $110 billion, an increase of around 22 per cent.

While it seems all major Google divisions are firing on all cylinders, the revenue was propelled by a massive surge in revenue of company’s cloud computing business. The sales in this division hit $20 billion, an increase of 63 per cent. The net income, meanwhile, rose to a whopping $62 billion, thanks to AI business. Nearly half of this income was result of Google’s investment in Anthropic going up in value in the last few months.

The story is same at Meta, Microsoft and Amazon. Amazon reported on Wednesday that its cloud division was expanding rapidly, with revenue climbing 28 per cent compared to last year. The unit has now grown large enough to contribute more than a fifth of the company's overall revenue, bringing in $37.59 billion during the quarter, up from $29.27 billion a year ago. Microsoft, meanwhile, said its Azure and other cloud offerings saw revenue jump of 40 per cent.

AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — these are the resources used to serve AI. As OpenAI and Anthropic, along with the rest of the world, spend money to offer AI to more and more users, big tech companies are benefiting.

The spending on AI infrastructure is also the reason why Samsung saw its chip division, which supplies memory for AI servers and AI chips, increase its profit to over $36 billion, almost a 50X jump compared to last year. This profit is nearly 94 per cent of total profit that the tech giant has declared this quarter.

The world wants more and more AI, even though for the rest of the world benefits are not yet clear. But this demand is making big tech companies ultra rich. Google Sundar Pichai captured the potential for earning even more from AI well when he said during the earnings call, “Our cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand.”

World spends money on AI, big tech earns

The bumper financial results declared by the big tech companies highlight a rather peculiar divide created by AI, at least for now. While the rest of the world is trying to use more and more AI because of its potential, or just because there is a peer-pressure effect going on, companies and people are spending an inordinate amount of money.

Uber, for example, burned through its entire AI budget in just 4 months. Recently Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said, “I'm back to the drawing board, because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already.”

Uber is not the only company that is burning money on AI. Almost every big company worth its salt is doing so. From SaaS companies to design firms they all are implementing AI solutions, trying to push their employees to use more AI tools and are hoping to be more productive in the process. For example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last night revealed that CoPilot, an AI tool, now has 20 million paid enterprise seats (users).

But so far, even though AI usage has grown at enterprise as well as personal level, productivity gains haven’t come for most companies. There is a possibility that in future, AI will make companies and professionals much more productive, and consequently richer, but currently it is all in the flux.

At the same time, as top AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic fight each other for dominance, market share, and best AI model, they are spending billions and billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. Their revenues are minuscule compared to their spending and they are losing money. It is even raising some alarm. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that OpenAI's CFO, Sarah Friar, is worried about the company spending too much money on data centers. But such is the race that OpenAI has no other option but to keep running.

But what is the loss of OpenAI and Anthropic is gain for Amazon and Google, who are riding the boom in AI demand.