Impressive growth, and even more, ahem, impressive capital spending :-O
According to page 6, year to date in 2026, operations generated $127B in cash, and capital spending on property and equipment was $132B, so year to date, the business consumed $5B.
According to page 8, in the last quarter, operations generated $42B and capital spending was $51B, so over the past three months, the business consumed $9B.
Those figures don't include any capital spending made through off-balance sheet arrangements. No idea what those might be, or for how much Alphabet could be on the hook.
I'm curious to see if all that money invested in infrastructure will pay off. I hope it pays off, for everyone's sake, but hope is not certainty.
It's a tale of two AIs for Google. Cloud doubled revenue and tripled profit, probably based off serving models. So good for Cloud.
Search increased revenue and profit which is good. Means that LLMs are not yet stealing revenue. But also bad because the massive spend on infrastructure doesn't look like it's going to come back as increased revenue.
People on the internet really overrate google's TPU advantage. OAI and Anthropic and others have been using TPUs as well for a long time now too. And they've also hired lots and lots of talent from the rest of FAANG, hyperscale compute talent and knowledge is also well distributed through all the top AI companies at this point.
It's wild how quickly the tide turned from big tech companies having hundreds of billions in cash reserves and not knowing what to do with it to now taking on hundreds of billions in debt for questionable infrastructure buildouts.
Ironically their massive cash reserves created an environment where the cost of AI infrastructure could be bid up so much to consume those very cash reserves.
Ad sales fall because the AI mania has made it clear that Big Tech does not care about humans, so humans go elsewhere.
Advertisers on the other hand are alerted to viewbotting with increasingly sophisticated AI "users".
It was clear already two years ago that the model of AI generated "content" that is watched by AI viewbots does not work. Of course Big Tech has to steam forward and find out the hard way.
Congrats, you have ruined the entire SV business model with your fantasies derived from cheap, horribly written SciFi novels.
I'm sure Google will end up being one of the winners no matter what but man the market hates the stock. It was trading at 16 p/e before earnings and is now at like 14. Less than half of Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia.
2. Youtube meh, like always (weird that it doesn't kill it)
3. Search -- this was the issue. QonQ 0.1% <-- the whole story
Everyone has expected Search to, sooner or later, crack. This looks like it may be it.
If Google had 30B in revenue from coding tools and a few billion from Gemini Enterprise then there would be a story that Google could get through this.
But GDM didn't execute. And that's that.
Who knows the bottom. More than 10-15% seems unlikely. But if search cracks again next quarter then we'll see a real revaluing of the business.
Google did not have the proper focus on AI. They should have owned the space. But there were clearly management issues.
Youtube has sucked for many years. I just don't know how much Google is responsible for it. Back in 2006, they were dealing with copyright battles (despite the fact they won their lawsuit against Viacom) so Google bought them to help them out with their resources. The site itself has tons of censorship and bad targeting on the recommended videos and I think Neal Mohan has made it even worse the last few years with more and more ads and Shorts and everything
Well it’s currently negatively affecting my life in every aspect other than being an upgrade to searches.
I don’t discount its capabilities since around April of this year, it passed my bar for being able to do amazing things. But it has also made any interaction I’ve had with companies a living nightmare and appears to have permanently deleted my career and knocked me down 1-2 economic classes.
According to page 6, year to date in 2026, operations generated $127B in cash, and capital spending on property and equipment was $132B, so year to date, the business consumed $5B.
According to page 8, in the last quarter, operations generated $42B and capital spending was $51B, so over the past three months, the business consumed $9B.
Those figures don't include any capital spending made through off-balance sheet arrangements. No idea what those might be, or for how much Alphabet could be on the hook.
I'm curious to see if all that money invested in infrastructure will pay off. I hope it pays off, for everyone's sake, but hope is not certainty.
Search increased revenue and profit which is good. Means that LLMs are not yet stealing revenue. But also bad because the massive spend on infrastructure doesn't look like it's going to come back as increased revenue.
> generating $127B in cash, and capital spending on property and equipment was $132B, so the business consumed $5B.
That’s an amazing amount of revenue and spend, though. Wild.
Advertisers on the other hand are alerted to viewbotting with increasingly sophisticated AI "users".
It was clear already two years ago that the model of AI generated "content" that is watched by AI viewbots does not work. Of course Big Tech has to steam forward and find out the hard way.
Congrats, you have ruined the entire SV business model with your fantasies derived from cheap, horribly written SciFi novels.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/google-stock-pl...
This isn't true. Meta ad sales and traffic are surging. This is mostly a problem with Google.
2. Youtube meh, like always (weird that it doesn't kill it)
3. Search -- this was the issue. QonQ 0.1% <-- the whole story
Everyone has expected Search to, sooner or later, crack. This looks like it may be it.
If Google had 30B in revenue from coding tools and a few billion from Gemini Enterprise then there would be a story that Google could get through this.
But GDM didn't execute. And that's that.
Who knows the bottom. More than 10-15% seems unlikely. But if search cracks again next quarter then we'll see a real revaluing of the business.
Google did not have the proper focus on AI. They should have owned the space. But there were clearly management issues.
It's a huuuge training set, why would they kill that?
I don’t discount its capabilities since around April of this year, it passed my bar for being able to do amazing things. But it has also made any interaction I’ve had with companies a living nightmare and appears to have permanently deleted my career and knocked me down 1-2 economic classes.
Translation: even Google ... a company that basically has a license to print money (aka Google Search) ... is losing a ton of money on AI.