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Good morning, it is Thursday, April 30, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
The big story was earnings, and it was unambiguous. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta — all beat on AI and cloud. Google Cloud hit twenty billion, Azure is running at a thirty-seven billion dollar AI annual rate, AWS posted its fastest growth in fifteen quarters. The numbers are real. But the market split hard on what comes next. Alphabet got rewarded. Meta got punished — down six percent despite thirty-three percent revenue growth — because investors looked at the capex guidance and flinched. These four companies combined are now pointing at roughly seven hundred ten billion dollars in AI infrastructure spend for 2026. That is an enormous bet, and the market is starting to ask who actually captures the return.
Meanwhile the Musk-Altman trial was equal parts legal proceeding and performance art. Emails surfaced showing Musk wanted majority control of OpenAI himself. The revisionist history is getting expensive.
And quietly, OpenAI is unwinding Stargate in favor of bilateral compute deals, Anthropic may be approaching a nine hundred billion dollar valuation, and the governance layer underneath all of this is being renegotiated in real time.
Back tomorrow.