VOL 1 · ISSUE 7 · FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2026
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The bill came due. Big Four said pay it.
$81.3B revenue, EPS $4.06. OpenAI deal restructure unblocks gross margin. Capacity, not demand, is the gate.
$106.9B revenue, +18% YoY. Capex guided
FY26, ~2× FY25. AI bill arrives at the income statement.
FY26 capex (record). The OpenAI Bedrock launch makes the AWS frame even sharper.
Q1 revenue $53.5–56.5B. Margin compressed 700 bps. 8,000 jobs cut May 20 to fund the spend.
had missed and the AI economy was over. Wednesday's narrative was that the AI economy was four other companies and they were fine.
all reported within a four-hour window after Wednesday’s close. Each held its capex. Each held or beat its cloud guidance. Each said the same thing about AI demand: the line is in capacity, not in customer interest.
Combined Big Four FY26 capex is now on the books at
— Microsoft holding the prior plan,
. Tuesday’s OpenAI report had been read as the first crack in the model layer’s pricing power. Wednesday answered: even if OpenAI specifically missed, the buyers of OpenAI’s compute did not.
The model layer had a bad Tuesday. The infrastructure layer had a fine Wednesday. The two layers are now visibly priced apart — and the next test is whether the gap closes from above (OpenAI catches up) or from below (the hyperscalers find the limit of demand they’ve been buying ahead of).
Big Four held the $715B line. The infrastructure layer is not OpenAI.
reported Q3 FY26 with Azure constant-currency growth at the
guided ceiling; Microsoft Cloud gross margin held at ~
. The OpenAI partnership restructure shifted licensing to non-exclusive and improved gross margins, removing the backlog overhang that hung over the print.
in annualized AI revenue; capex guided to a record
, with the OpenAI Bedrock launch confirmed as a near-term contributor.