Calcbench ran some numbers to quantify how real that effect is. We found that yes, the tech giants do distort certain line items on Corporate America’s collective income statement to a material degree — although that’s not always the case, and analysts can glean a lot of insight into overall corporate performance either way. 

See Figure 1, below. It charts the year-over-year change in 14 significant line items from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025 for roughly 3,700 non-financial companies. We split that whole group into three components:

• All non-financial firms altogether, tech giants and others alike.

• The “Mag 7” companies, which are Nvidia, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla; plus Oracle, which is such a new addition to the group that people haven’t started calling them the Mag 8 yet.

• All non-financial firms excluding the Mag 7 plus Oracle.

What does Figure 1 tell us? A few points jump out right away.

The overall increase in capex spending depended entirely on the tech giants. Their year-over-year capex spending jumped a whopping 69.6 percent, almost all of it going to build data centers for artificial intelligence — but all others saw their collective capex spend decline by 0.8 percent. So if you only looked at the overall increase for everyone (12.8 percent), you wouldn’t know that capex spending actually fell across most of the economy this summer and fall. 

The tech giants are burning through cash. All through Q3 earnings season, Calcbench had noticed in our Earnings Tracker that while most income statement lines were increasing nicely, cash wasn’t among them. Now we can see why: because cash among the tech giants dropped 14.3 percent, while it increased for everyone else by 2.6 percent. 

Net income growth wasn’t affected by the tech giants. Year-over-year growth was 16.3 percent for the entire population, and 16.6 percent for everyone excluding the tech giants. 

From insights like these, financial analysts can dive deeper with more probing questions, too. 

For example, if a tech giant is investing rapidly in capex and burning through its cash reserves, could that mean it will need to raise more debt in the future? What would more debt mean for the company’s debt-to-equity ratio and free cash flow? 

Or for all those non-tech giants who are still seeing healthy net income growth — how are they doing that, exactly? Revenue is rising faster than cost of revenue, but only barely; and operating expenses are growing faster than revenue. So perhaps analysts need to investigate the Other Income line to see whether one-time items are buoying net income; or whether cuts to capex might constrain long-term growth if the economy starts to accelerate rapidly.

We’ll dig deeper into the Mag 7+ effect in future posts. For now we wanted to lay down the foundational findings that something is there worth financial analysts’ attention. Calcbench can help you excavate that insight and see what it tells you.