48% of Google Cloud revenue next year could come from two unprofitable companies

Google Cloud has been one of Alphabet’s best growth stories in recent quarters. Revenue surged 48% year-over-year in Q4 2025, with subsequent quarters posting 63% and 82% growth. Dig one layer deeper, though, and the picture gets more complicated. According to UBS analyst estimates, OpenAI and Anthropic could account for more than 48% of Google Cloud’s revenue by 2027, up from a projected 27% in 2026. Neither company has ever turned a profit. The concentration problem Both OpenAI and Anthropic have raised enormous sums to train and deploy their large language models. That capital flows, in significant part, straight into cloud infrastructure fees. Google Cloud collects rent on the compute power these companies burn through at industrial scale. Ed Zitron, a prominent tech commentator, has pointed to this dynamic as evidence that much of the hyperscaler infrastructure buildout is effectively a pass-through mechanism. The billions Alphabet is pouring into data centers and chips may be less about serving a broad, diversified customer base and more about capturing spend from a narrow set of AI developers who themselves haven’t figured out how to make money. Alphabet’s capex appetite Alp...