Daily Earnings: Accounting illusions mask the AI CapEx bill (AMZN, GOOGL, META) | Apr 29

Big Tech printed historic profit beats across the board this quarter, but those headline numbers rely on significant accounting anomalies to obscure a terrifying, cash-draining AI infrastructure bill. - AMZN and GOOGL utilized tens of billions in non-operating paper gains to artificially mask margin pressure.- Unprecedented compute expenditures forced Amazon to take on heavy debt and caused Alphabet to freeze buybacks.- Downstream supplier TER crashed after revealing that unbuilt physical data centers cannot accept new hardware deliveries.The transition to physical AI infrastructure is effectively suspending the era of zero-marginal-cost software and inflicting serious damage on free cash flow metrics.