Calcbench

The headline number The four largest cloud providers now report nearly $2.4 trillion of remaining performance obligations (RPO): revenue under signed contracts that has not yet been recognized. The totals are easy to add up. They are much harder to compare, because each company describes the timing of that backlog in a different way. Before we get into the analysis, at the bottom are the tags and the datapoints that we used to get the data directly out of Calcbench. Company RPO ($B) As of Scope Microsoft 684.0 Jun 30, 2026 Company-wide ($678B commercial) Oracle 664.0 Aug 31, 2026 Company-wide...

You may have seen articles in the mainstream business press lately questioning the strength of the AI investment boom . Are AI pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic making any money? If they’re not, do we know how much money they’re losing? And are those losses showing up on the books of other tech companies, that financial analysts could get a better sense of the true picture here?  As always, Calcbench is on the case.  Let’s start with Microsoft ($MSFT), which has been investing in OpenAI for years, primarily via cloud computing resources Microsoft provides to the generative AI startup. In its quarterly report from Oct. 29 , Microsoft reported a $4.1 billion loss from those investments, up from a $688 million loss in the year-earlier period. See Figure 1, below. We were intrigued. If Microsoft is reporting a $4.1 billion loss on OpenAI today and a $688 million loss one year ago, what other losses has it disclosed related to OpenAI in the past?  Alas, we can’t really tell. ...