Four real contracted-demand figures, one provable double count, and the discipline to refuse a correction the disclosures cannot support
You are writing a research note on 2026 AI-infrastructure demand. An analyst has added four contracted-demand figures together and called the total 'industry backlog': Oracle's $523B RPO, Alphabet's ~$462B Google Cloud backlog, CoreWeave's $99.4B revenue backlog, and Microsoft's ~$80B unfulfilled Azure backlog. Every figure is real. The total is not. Work out what is actually wrong with it — and what you can honestly say instead.