Forget Nvidia. 1 of These 3 Hyperscalers Could Be the Top AI Stock Through 2030.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) reports earnings on May 20, and the conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) tends to start and end with the chipmaker. But the companies funding the AI boom -- buying Nvidia's chips and building the data centers that house them -- may be a more interesting place to put new money to work right now.

Combined 2026 capital spending from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG), and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is tracking to roughly $570 billion. That is an unprecedented level of capital allocation, even for big tech. And while each of these three cloud giants has its own reasons for investor excitement, the latest quarterly results suggest the better long-term ideas may not be the names investors might expect.

Here is a closer look at each one.

Microsoft

Microsoft may be a software giant, but it's also an established AI leader -- and its business is benefiting from broad-based momentum.

In its fiscal third quarter of 2026 (the period ended March 31, 2026), revenue rose 18% year over year to $82.9 billion, with Azure and other cloud services climbing 40%. With help from AI demand, Microsoft Cloud revenue crossed $54 billion.

And the company's profitability growth has been exceptional. Microsoft's earnings per share grew 23% year over year during fiscal Q3.

Further, the company's commercial remaining performance obligations (essentially a backlog of contracted future revenue) nearly doubled year over year to $627 billion.

But the most eye-catching figure from the update? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company's AI-related business is now running at a $37 billion annual revenue run rate -- up 123% year over year.

But the spending profile to support this growth is steep. Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood guided to capital spending of roughly $190 billion for calendar 2026 -- up about 61% from 2025, with about $25 billion of that increase tied to higher memory and component costs. The company also expects to remain capacity-constrained through 2026, even as it works to bring new graphics processing units (GPUs) and storage capacity online.

Alphabet

And Alphabet is standing out with its sharp acceleration in its cloud computing business, Google Cloud.

Alphabet's first-quarter revenue rose 22% to $109.9 billion. And Google Cloud revenue surged 63% to $20 billion. That was a significant acceleration compared to 48% growth in the prior quarter.

The backlog tells a similar story.

Google Cloud's contracted future revenue nearly doubled in a single quarter to about $462 billion, with management saying it expects to recognize just over half of that backlog as revenue over the next 24 months.

Meanwhile, the Google services side -- the part many investors initially thought AI would eventually erode -- is holding up well, too. Search and other revenue grew 19%, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said queries are at an all-time high, with AI features like AI Mode and AI Overviews driving engagement. The company has also begun selling its custom tensor processing units (TPUs) directly to a small group of cloud customers, opening up an additional revenue stream tied to its in-house silicon.

Amazon

Amazon similarly saw double-digit revenue growth and an acceleration in its cloud business.

Net sales rose 17% to $181.5 billion in its first quarter of 2026, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) jumped 28% to $37.6 billion -- the cloud segment's fastest pace in roughly four years and a meaningful step up from 24% growth in the fourth quarter of 2025. AWS operating income reached $14.2 billion, with segment operating margin climbing to about 38%.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spent much of the first-quarter earnings call on the company's custom silicon.

"Our Trainium2 chip has about 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs, and has largely sold out," he said. "Trainium3, which just started shipping at the start of 2026 and is 30-40% more price-performant than Trainium2, is nearly fully subscribed. And, much of Trainium4, which is still about 18 months from broad availability, has already been reserved."

All told, Amazon now has more than $225 billion in revenue commitments tied to Trainium, with anchor customers including Anthropic and OpenAI.

But, as with Microsoft and Alphabet, this growth profile requires significant spending. Capital spending in the quarter alone hit $44.2 billion, and full-year 2026 spending is tracking toward $200 billion.

The better buys

Any of these three could turn out to be the top AI stock through 2030. But if I had to choose, I would lean toward Alphabet and Amazon, with Alphabet slightly edging out Amazon.

Alphabet has the fastest-growing cloud business of the group, an AI-aided search engine that is reaccelerating, a custom AI chip program beginning to ship to outside customers, and even a self-driving car business via Waymo, which now exceeds 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week.

Meanwhile, Amazon has the AWS reacceleration story, a $20 billion-and-growing custom chips business with multi-year commitments locked in, a fast-growing advertising business at over $70 billion in trailing-twelve-month revenue, and structurally improving retail margins.

Microsoft's quarter was excellent, and at a price-to-earnings ratio of about 25, the stock is the cheapest of the three. But Azure's 40% growth trails Google Cloud's 63%, and the sheer scale of capital required to keep pace could pressure free cash flow well into next year.

Of course, each of these names carries real risk; an AI demand slowdown before the spending catches up would hit all three. Still, Amazon and Alphabet appear to offer a slightly more diversified mix of catalysts at valuations that could prove rewarding over the long haul, with Alphabet's faster-growing cloud business with soaring margins helping it edge out as the ultimate winner in my opinion.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.