Mag 7, Markets, and Mailbag with CEO Tom Gardner
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57% of the MAG7's earnings today on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. New name, same great investing podcast. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributor, John Quast. And we have a special guest today, Motley Fool CEO, Tom Gardner. Tom, thank you for joining us today. Pleasure to be here. I want to put you on the spot, because we just did the name change to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Give me the quick elevator pitch with the name change.
Well, the spirit of our podcast of The Motley Fool, our Hidden Gems Investing podcast, and our Rule Breaker Investing podcast is to present our two primary approaches to long-term investing. In the case of Rule Breakers, it's to look for innovative breakthrough businesses. And in the case of Hidden Gems, it's to really look at the ownership, leadership, and the financial management of companies on a growth path. Both styles are very similar. but in that they both share a passion for holding stocks for the very long-term, being investors in the stock market throughout our entire lives. But we have two different wrinkles on how to look at companies, and we love having those two different brands in The Motley Fool, and they're expressed here in podcast form.
Great that we get to do this on this podcast. For today, on the docket, we're going to pull a question out of the mailbag that we're getting lots of responses for. We're going to do what we're calling Tom's mystery box topic, because he's the guest of the honor today. But first, we're going to start with the Magnificent Seven earnings, or specifically, four out of the seven. Within the past 24 hours, or at least since we posted our last show, we've had Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all post results. It's remarkable how the market seems to be playing this one of these things is not like the other right now. Go up and down the press releases for all four of these companies and you more or less see the same thing.
Massive top and bottom line beats of analysts to the point where Maybe Wall Street analysts are bad at their jobs. You've got cloud revenue for all of these companies growing 20% to 30%. All are raising capital spending plans for 2026. Maybe not for the reason people were hoping, but big raises nonetheless. Yet, the market reactions, we have Alphabet up 6%, Amazon's about down 1%, Microsoft down 4%, and Meta down a whopping 10% as we're recording. John, I'm going to go to you first. As far as what you saw, these similar reactions across the board, what were some of the big themes across all four that you saw?
For sure, three out of these four companies that you just mentioned, Tyler, are the large public cloud providers with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google Cloud. As you look at these three businesses, all three of them posting just massive growth, some of them acceleration on a scale that's hard to comprehend. We're talking tens of billions of dollars added. You look at Microsoft Azure, for example, 39% year-over-year growth, but its AI annual recurring revenue, that portion is up over 100% year-over-year to $37 billion. You look at Amazon AWS, 28% growth, that's its best in over four years. Then, here's the real surprising one. Alphabet's cloud revenue up 63% year-over-year. If that wasn't impressive enough, you have spending commitments, you have performance obligations, you have a backlog with this kind of a business.
Alphabet's backlog nearly doubled in a single quarter. We're talking a $460 billion backlog compared to $240 billion in the previous quarter. That tracks with what AWS is reporting as well. It added $120 billion to its backlog in a single quarter. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars added to future spending commitments for the public cloud providers, and that is just massive.
These have been walloping numbers. As we were hinting at, this is hidden gem-style investing. Looking at the Magnificent Seven, the most probably well-known companies in the world, there always can be some misunderstood or hidden aspects of what is with these companies.
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