The 72-Hour Window
July 28–30: Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta all report within 72 hours. Our filing-read list, published before the prints.
Between July 28 and July 30, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta all report earnings — four balance sheets carrying the AI build-out, filing within seventy-two hours of each other. Most coverage will be about whether the numbers beat. Ours will be about what the filings say, and we are publishing the reading list in advance so you can hold us to it.
What we pull, per name, same day
The useful-life notes. Three of these four extended server accounting lives between 2023 and 2025, deferring more than $10 billion of annual depreciation. Amazon reversed — six years to five, citing AI obsolescence, taking a billion-dollar earnings hit to do it. The first thing we read in every filing is whether anyone else turned. A second reversal would end the “isolated judgment call” defense; conspicuous silence, quarter after quarter, is its own data point.
The equity marks. Microsoft’s OpenAI gains and Amazon’s Anthropic adjustment put roughly $18 billion of paper profit from the loop into reported results over recent quarters. We read the investment notes for the next marks — in either direction. A markdown on a lab stake would be the loop deflating in the filings themselves.
The commitments. Any change to the OpenAI and Anthropic compute commitments — new amounts, revised terms, early terminations, or conversions of backlog to actual drawn revenue. This is falsifier territory: commitments converting to cash on schedule weakens our thesis, and we will report it exactly as prominently as the reverse.
Capex against cash flow. The guide, the actual, and the gap between the build and the operating cash that funds it — per name, quarter over quarter.
The demand words. Every quarter has a tell — last cycle it was “excess capacity,” this month it was a hyperscaler moving to rent out spare AI compute. We read the segment language for the next one.
The commitment
Same-day reads, published before midnight Eastern on each filing day, with accession numbers, on the record. If a filing contradicts our thesis, that finding leads. This desk’s whole method is the receipt: the watch list you just read is dated and public, and the results will sit next to it.
Four filings. Seventy-two hours. The tape, not the takes.
The desk’s live watch list per name: Earnings Desk · the indicators they feed: The Ground Truth Tape