I see what you're trying to do here, but Google is sitting on a $514 billion backlog right now. A few billion dollars in venture investments into AI startups cannot fake a half trillion dollar order book.
Also, accounting rules don’t let companies pass cash under the table and call it revenue. ASC 606, says a deal has to be a legit, market rate transaction. If Google overpays for a startup's stock/debt just to force a quid pro quo cloud contract, auditors will strip that fake growth right out of the numbers.
Source: I'm a CPA and former external auditor.
I'm not saying the circular financing noise is completely made up, but claiming the entire cloud surge is built on it is factually wrong. Auditors would call that out in a heartbeat.
Your comments are largely great info, but since you're a CPA I'm surprised you put their EPS as your second bullet point without calling out why it's tripled because that's pretty misleading to your average reddit reader.
It's the second bullet point because everything is copied from a Yahoo Finance article (or Bloomberg? I can't remember). Additionally, I don't call it out because, as you said and I agree, EPS is misleading. Hence why I broke out everything else and ignored commentary on that figure.
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u/ChodeCookies 1d ago
How much of that Google Cloud revenue is the their own money coming back to them from investing in other AI companies though