Amazon’s Anthropic Windfall Reveals AI’s New Profit Map

Dear readers,

Silicon Valley closes a chapter today. Tim Cook’s final day as Apple’s chief executive ends this afternoon, with John Ternus set to take the reins tomorrow morning. It’s a tidy bookend for a session that otherwise feels anything but tidy — Middle East escalation and rekindled rate-hike fears are weighing on futures. Yet the numbers coming out of corporate America this week tell a strikingly different story from the macro gloom. The AI trade’s hardware-first phase is giving way to something more durable: software and cloud providers are converting their infrastructure bets into real margin, and Monday’s data make that case better than any chart could.

Software Cashes the AI Check

The proof keeps compounding. Salesforce shares jumped 18% in the wake of last week’s blowout print — adjusted earnings of $5.90 a share against a Street estimate of $3.27, on revenue of $11.35 billion, up 11% year over year. But the real rerating isn’t happening on the top line; it’s happening on Agentforce and Data 360, whose combined annual recurring revenue reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210% year over year, with Agentforce ARR alone topping $1.5 billion, up over 240%. A new integration with Anthropic’s Claude model is already feeding that growth. Argus took notice, lifting its price target on Salesforce to $300 from $290 while keeping its buy rating intact.

ServiceNow is validating the same thesis from a different angle: its AI business crossed $1 billion in annual contract value in the second quarter, and AI-powered workflows are on pace to top $1 billion in bookings for all of 2026. SaaS has stopped being merely a customer of the AI boom. It’s now one of its most reliable beneficiaries — and Wall Street’s price targets are starting to reflect that.

Amazon’s AI Payoff Comes With a Twist

The hyperscalers are cashing in too, though Amazon’s version of the story comes with an extra layer. AWS revenue hit $42.2 billion in the quarter, up 37% year over year — the fastest growth pace in 18 quarters — pushing the division’s annualized run rate to $169 billion. Operating income for the cloud unit reached $16.6 billion, a 39.4% margin that would make most software companies jealous. Then there’s the figure that actually moved Amazon’s bottom line: net income of $62.647 billion for the quarter, of which $53.396 billion came not from selling cloud capacity but from an upward revaluation of Amazon’s equity stake in Anthropic. Amazon isn’t just renting out AI infrastructure anymore; it owns a piece of one of the model layer’s most valuable names, and that stake alone dwarfed AWS’s entire operating profit for the period.

That Amazon still plans to spend $220 billion on capital expenditures this year says something about the confidence sitting behind AWS’s $496 billion order backlog. Investors buying Big Tech right now aren’t just buying data centers — increasingly, they’re buying a direct claim on the AI ecosystem’s most valuable private stakes.

Chipmakers Brace as Nvidia Moves Into Their Turf

Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Salesforce?

Down at the silicon layer, the mood is less celebratory. Nvidia disclosed Monday that it has put $3.5 billion into convertible bonds issued by Taiwan’s MediaTek, a direct move into the custom-silicon market that Broadcom and Marvell have long treated as their own territory. The two rivals reacted differently. Marvell fell 10.1% on August 28 after guidance that undercut an otherwise solid quarter — a reminder that in this market, forward-looking numbers carry more weight than trailing ones. Broadcom, by contrast, is pressing its advantage, rolling out new software today for monitoring autonomous AI agents alongside a private AI cloud offering. The fight for AI supremacy has stopped being purely about raw compute. Increasingly, it’s a contest over who controls the software and security layers sitting on top of the chips.

Iran, Inflation, and a Fed That Won’t Blink

Away from earnings season, the macro backdrop is genuinely unsettled. U.S. forces struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island on Sunday, and oil markets responded immediately: Brent crude jumped more than 2%, climbing back above $90 a barrel, with futures touching $90.32. Germany added its own pressure point, with preliminary data showing annual inflation accelerating to 2.9% in August — its highest reading since April. Combined with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole message that taming prices remains the central bank’s core duty, the Iran strikes have hardened market expectations for a rate hike later this year rather than the cut some had been hoping for. Treasury yields are climbing in response, which explains the cautious tone in U.S. equity futures Monday.

Bitcoin Holds Its Ground

Crypto is proving steadier than the macro mood would suggest. Bitcoin opened Monday at $77,695 and has since edged up toward $78,000, stabilizing after a rough stretch tied to rate-hike repricing. MicroStrategy gave the market a fresh vote of confidence, ending a 10-week pause in its buying to purchase 4,603 BTC for roughly $369.7 million — an average price above $80,000 a coin. That’s a bet on higher prices ahead, not a hedge against lower ones.

The Takeaway

None of this erases the risks piling up — a hotter oil market, sticky European inflation, and a Fed chair who sounds increasingly unwilling to cut rates on schedule. But the companies actually converting AI spending into cash flow are giving investors something firmer to hold onto than sentiment alone. This Friday’s jobs report for August will likely be the last major data point before the Fed’s mid-September decision, and it will matter enormously for the multiple markets are willing to pay for growth. Until then, the safest ground in this tape belongs to businesses that have already turned their AI bets into revenue — not the ones still promising to.

Best regards,
The StocksToday.com Editorial