Q2 earnings are beating estimates by a record 31%. Take out two companies and it is 9%.

US companies are beating Q2 estimates by an unusual margin. S&P 500 earnings have come in 31.4% above analyst estimates in aggregate, the widest gap since FactSet began tracking the figure in 2008. The next passage of the same report carries a caveat. Strip out Alphabet and Amazon and the number falls to 9.2%.

S&P 500 Earnings Season Update: July 31, 2026 (FactSet, 2026-07-31)

출처: insight.factset.com

What happened at those two companies

Most of what those two booked was not money earned by selling anything. It was the carrying value of stakes they already held moving up. When an asset a company has not sold rises in value, accounting rules require that increase to be recorded as income in that quarter. That is an unrealised gain. No cash arrives, and the net income line grows anyway. A painting on your wall getting more valuable does not raise your salary that year. Corporate accounting still writes the increase into the profit line. Amazon added $53.4 billion pre-tax to income this way from its Anthropic stake. Operating income in the same quarter was $27.5 billion, so the mark-up on the stake was close to twice what the business itself earned.

Amazon's $200B Quarter: Ads, AWS, and the Anthropic Gain (Digital Applied, 2026-07-31)

출처: digitalapplied.com

Alphabet is the same shape. As covered in an earlier card, Alphabet's pre-tax unrealised gain was $99 billion, from its SpaceX and Anthropic holdings. Anthropic is the name that appears in both.

So is the unprecedented AI earnings claim right

Half right. Companies that converted AI demand into actual revenue, chipmakers and cloud operators, did post strong quarters again. But that is not what produced the index-level surprise record. What produced it was the book value of two companies' holdings in an AI startup.

Neither reading disputes that earnings are good. They split on whether the profit was earned by selling products or recorded because an AI company got more expensive on paper.

So what settles this

The question comes down to one thing. Is this record the size of the profit AI created, or the price someone put on an AI company. The place to look is next quarter. If Anthropic is not marked up again, this quarter's gain does not repeat, and if the valuation falls the same rule cuts net income in the other direction. If the 9.2% ex-Alphabet-and-Amazon figure holds up next quarter, that supports the reading that AI demand is arriving as real revenue. The record is a fact. Roughly two-thirds of what made it is the value of stakes nobody sold. A number written in by a rule can be written out by the same rule.