“We’re really focused on scaling the business right now and executing to that extraordinary potential,” Pichai said on Google’s Waymo bet.

— Samantha Subin

Google is already dedicating resources to its Gemini 4 model as AI competition heats up, Pichai told analysts on Wednesday.

“It’s a very ambitious effort,” he said. “We wanted to compete at the frontier level of where the frontier will be when Gemini 4 comes out, so we are applying a lot of our compute and effort in that direction.”

As Gemini scales, Pichai said the company plans to release new models almost every month.

—Samantha Subin

Google lifted its full-year spending guide, expecting capital expenditures to range between $195 billion and $205 billion on strong AI demand.

“The increase in the range is primarily due to an acceleration in the delivery of capacity to meet growing demand,” finance chief Anat Ashkenazi told analysts.

Analysts polled by Visible Alpha had been looking for about $188 billion in 2026 capital spending.

Last quarter, the company boosted capex guidance to as much as $190 billion and said it’s planning for a significant increase in spending.

Ashkenazi reiterated those comments and said Google will continue investing as long as the return looks attractive.

“We’re still in a supply-constrained environment,” she said. “I think we’ve said this now for multiple quarters in a row, and we are seeing very strong demand both from external cloud customers as well as across the business.”

— Samantha Subin

Alphabet plans to call on third-party cloud providers to meet feverish computing demand.

“Given the supply constraints environment, we plan to expand the use of third-party capacity in Q3 as a bridging strategy while we build up more internal capacity,” Anat Ashkenazi, the company’s finance chief, said on Wednesday’s earnings call. “The strategy allows us to keep growing our customer base and capture greater overall value. However, it will create modest margin pressure in the near term as we utilize this capacity.”

The effort builds on Alphabet’s deal with SpaceX to rent Nvidia graphics processing units for running artificial intelligence models for $920 million per month.

Google’s cloud rival Microsoft has been more active in leasing capacity from a series of outside clouds, including CoreWeave, Iren, Lambda Labs, Nebius and Nscale. CoreWeave and Nebius shares leapt 4% and 5% in extended trading, respectively, after Ashkenazi’s comments.

“There are very, very large customers of ours on cloud, who we are trying to support them through this extraordinary moment, and the incremental opportunity they are bringing to us, while a short-term cost over a few months may be very high, in the lifetime of the deal, as we bring more capacity on, is highly ROI positive,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said.

—Jordan Novet

Google’s finance chief Anat Ashkenazi told analysts during the earnings call to brace for some tougher comparisons when it comes to the company’s search business.

Ashkenazi noted that while Google continues “to benefit from innovation in search by improving the user and advertiser experience with AI,” the third quarter might be a bit different.

“At the same time, in Q3, we will begin lapping an acceleration in search performance that began in the third quarter last year,” Ashkenazi said.

Considering Google’s search revenue for the second quarter came in at $63.3 billion, slightly behind Wall Street’s expectations of $63.4 billion, and investors will likely be scrutinizing the business in the third quarter.

—Jonathan Vanian

Most of Google’s $44.9 billion capital expenditures went to technical infrastructure to support the AI buildout, finance chief Anat Ashkenazi told analysts on an earnings call.

About 60% of infrastructure investments went to servers and 40% toward data centers and networking equipment.

—Samantha Subin

Developers are increasingly adopting Google’s artificial intelligence coding tool Antigravity. It now has over 2.4 million weekly active users, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the Google parent’s earnings call.

The company provides an Antigravity free tier, and it comes with the $19.99 monthly Google AI Pro and $99.99 Google AI Ultra subscriptions. Enterprise pricing is also available. Pichai did not say how many of the 2.4 million were paying.

In Antigravity, people can select models from Google and from Anthropic, along with an open model OpenAI released last year. Options from Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.ai are not available.

On Tuesday, Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead for OpenAI’s competing Codex tool, said Codex and the recently announced ChatGPT Work agent now have 10 million weekly active users, up from 6 million one week earlier. OpenAI introduced the GPT-5.6 model on July 9.

Anthropic has not specified the number of people using its Claude Code software-development service. SpaceX is working to complete the acquisition of AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion by the end of the third quarter. Alphabet owns stakes in both Anthropic and SpaceX.

—Jordan Novet

Google said businesses are embracing their artificial intelligence-powered advertising tools like Performance Max and AI Max.

Customers using these tools are seeing 50% more conversions on average on search at a similar return on advertising spend, the company said.

— Samantha Subin

If you’re wondering why Google shares are flat in after-hours trading despite the company’s cloud computing unit soaring a whopping 82% from a year ago, Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management had some thoughts.

Munster said in a post on X that Google missing on search and operating margins likely played a role in muting investor enthusiasm over cloud computing growth.

“My take: Given what we now know, the stock should be up tomorrow,” Munster said before the earnings call. “The Cloud number is the most important number and it was a massive beat.”

—Jonathan Vanian

The recent World Cup international soccer tournament drove record search queries to Google.

“As a big football fan, I was particularly excited to see search usage hit an all-time high during the World Cup this year,” Pichai said on an earnings call with analysts. “This really highlights how much people turn to Google in moments that matter.”

The company said 1.7 billion unique viewers globally watched World Cup-related videos on YouTube during the event.

— Samantha Subin

Alphabet’s other bets category — which includes businesses like Waymo and Verily — came in at $382 million for the second quarter, representing a 2.4% year-over-year increase.

—Jonathan Vanian

Google’s YouTube advertising revenue rose 13% to about $11.06 billion, topping a StreetAccount estimate of $10.81 billion.

That’s up from $9.8 billion in the year-ago period and about $9.9 billion last quarter.

— Samantha Subin

Perhaps the biggest catalyst in Alphabet’s profit-and-loss statement, released after market close on Wednesday, was the $97.98 billion in “other income.” It’s the singular factor that helped Alphabet’s profit reach $112.11 billion for the second quarter, up 298% year over year.

The main source of the “other income” bump was a $99.03 billion gain on equity securities. The gain was up from just $1.29 billion in the second quarter of 2025.

The $99.03 billion figure includes realized and unrealized gains and losses. Alphabet is sitting on investments in Anthropic and SpaceX. But SpaceX shares have come down nearly 33% since the second quarter ended.

— Jordan Novet

“Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a press release, highlighting the company’s strong AI pipeline.

The company said its Gemini App now has 950 million active users and can process 22 billion API tokens per minute. That’s up from 16 billion last quarter.

— Samantha Subin

Google reported $44.9 billion in capital expenditures during the second-quarter. StreetAccount estimates called for capex of $44.8 billion.

The company said second-quarter capital expenditures grew 100% year-over-year.

— Samantha Subin

Google’s search revenue grew 17% to $63.3 billion, up from about $54.2 billion a year ago. That was slight behind a StreetAccount estimate of $63.4 billion.

— Samantha Subin

Google’s cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion, up from $13.6 billion a year ago.

Analysts had forecast revenue of $22.4 billion, reflecting 64% year-over-year growth. Cloud backlog totalled $514 billion, the company said.

Google’s cloud growth has been accelerating ahead of competitors Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.

Last quarter, Google’s cloud business topped $20 billion.

— Samantha Subin

Google’s revenue rose 24% to $119.8 billion, up from $96.4 billion in the year-ago period, the company said.

— Samantha Subin

Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle venture, Waymo, is far ahead of U.S. competitors today. In late 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees at an all-hands meeting that he expected the business to “meaningfully” contribute to Alphabet’s financials as soon as 2027.

Executives are likely to face questions about Waymo, as the company fields safety concerns while working to expand in the U.S. and to take the robotaxi service international this year.

Today, Waymo operates a driverless ride-hailing service commercially in 11 major metro areas across the U.S., and is running testing or limited services in 21 other cities, including testing in London and Tokyo.

According to an online database maintained by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, Waymo now has 677 robotaxis registered in the Lone Star state, compared to 175 vehicles registered for use as driverless ride-hailing vehicles in Texas by Tesla and 44 registered by Amazon-owned Zoox.

In its first quarter update, Baidu said its Apollo Go robotaxi service footprint spanned 27 cities as of May 2026, and during that period, the autonomous ride-hailing service delivered 3.2 million fully driverless operational rides.

—Lora Kolodny

Despite the war in Iran and ongoing concerns about its impact on the broader economy, the digital advertising market appears to be humming along.

Analysts at Bernstein wrote in a note on Tuesday that their recent advertising channel checks “were strong for Meta and Google,” implying that the two digital ad titans will likely report another healthy quarter of sales growth.

Wolfe Research analysts agree, writing in a note on Monday that their ad checks show a “resilient environment” that suggests “stability in Q2 despite macro concerns.” And they see a boost from the World Cup and upcoming midterm elections. As for threats posed by OpenAI, Wolfe’s analysts described those as “headline risks,” but said, “Google Search ad demand trends continue to imply at least stable trends.”

Meta reports results next week.

— Jonathan Vanian

Google’s earnings come on the heels of some major high-profile departures, as the battle for top artificial intelligence talent heats up.

Gemini co-head Noam Shazeer announced in June that he was joining OpenAI, less than two years after returning through a partnership with his startup. Senior researcher scientist John Jumper left Google Deepmind for Anthropic last month.

Technology companies have spent billions in recent months to lure top talent and acquire AI capabilities. The frontier labs, however, are starting to face a new reality, as businesses begin reining in token costs and seek out cheaper alternatives.

Software companies have also fallen victim to the AI talent drain as frontier labs build out the enterprise layer.

—Samantha Subin

Investors will be paying attention to Alphabet’s investment income after a recent Anthropic funding round pushed up the value of Google’s holding in the model developer.

In 2023, Google first bought a 10% stake in Anthropic. The search company announced plans to invest up to $40 billion more in April, having invested more than $3 billion in the startup already. By May, with Anthropic’s Claude Code gaining attention for its ability to quickly write application code, the company said investors had valued it at $965 billion. That was up from $380 billion as of February.

Alphabet is also sitting on a stake in SpaceX, which went public in June, after first investing $900 million in the rocket maker in 2015. SpaceX shares have drifted down about 8% since the record-setting initial public offering.

Three months ago, Google touted a $37 billion gain on equity securities.

—Jordan Novet

Google is trying to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic with its cutting-edge Gemini AI models, while also offering models at prices that recognize a more frugal approach to AI spending.

On Tuesday, the company released three new Gemini models, including its clearest answer yet to Anthropic‘s lead in cybersecurity. Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is designed to detect and patch software vulnerabilities and will initially be available only to governments and trusted partners through a limited-access pilot. Google said the specialized model runs at a lower price per token than larger models.

With Gemini 3.6 Flash, Google aims to bolster its coding assistant technology while using up to 17% fewer tokens and offering a lower price per token than the previous model.

The pricing war in AI is heating up as demand soars for open-source models, largely out of China. The hottest recent example is Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.

— MacKenzie Sigalos

Google’s stock is on pace for a third straight month as the company heads into the second-quarter print on mounting AI skepticism.

Shares are up 11% for the year but have dropped 1% in May, 6% in June and are pacing for a nearly 3% loss in July.

That puts the company behind Apple and Nvidia for the year.

Google’s stock drop comes as skepticism swirls over skyrocketing artificial intelligence spending and businesses pour billions into the infrastructure buildout.

— Samantha Subin

Investors shouldn’t expect Alphabet’s epic spending spree to change course next year.

Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said in April that 2027 capex is likely to “significantly increase” from the up to $190 billion planned for this year.

Evercore analysts wrote in a note over the weekend that “when the CFO warns about following year capex in the March Quarter, the plans are going to be aggressive.” The Evercore analysts then — jokingly — asked if the number could hit “$300B? $350B?!”

Ultimately, they settled on an estimate of $262 billion, and noted that they’re concerned “that capex spend could ramp higher than this.” The consensus estimate for Alphabet’s 2027 capex is about $257 billion, according to FactSet.

— Jonathan Vanian

Analysts expect YouTube’s advertising revenue growth to ease up as the video engine reaches greater scale.

The unit should contribute $10.81 billion in revenue, which would imply roughly 10% growth from a year earlier, decelerating from 11% expansion in the first quarter.

In May, at the I/O developer conference, Google said YouTube had reached 3 billion users, alongside the company’s search engine, Gmail, Chrome and Android. The milestone makes the site an increasingly compelling destination for advertisers.

Meta had 3.56 billion “daily active people” across its apps in the first quarter.

Evercore ISI analysts came away with a favorable assessment of YouTube’s stature following a June survey. In a note to clients on Sunday, they pointed to relatively attractive advertising costs and “linear TV leakage.”

—Jordan Novet

Google is trailing Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, but it’s been growing faster.

Second-quarter revenue in Alphabet’s Google Cloud unit, which includes infrastructure and Google Workspace productivity subscriptions, is expected to show 64% growth from a year earlier to $22.24 billion, according to StreetAccount.

That’s an acceleration from 63% expansion in the first quarter, which topped market leader Amazon Web Services’ 28% growth. At Microsoft, revenue from Azure and other cloud services increased 40%.

Large companies are running more apps on Google’s cloud, incorporating the company’s AI models, CEO Sundar Pichai said on the last earnings call in April. Additionally, the Gemini Enterprise assistant for corporate workers, which starts at $21 per person per month, is gaining traction, he said.

Demand for Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, is also ramping at AI labs. In April, Google touted a cloud TPU for training AI models and one that handles inference jobs.

The $29.5 billion acquisition earlier this year of cloud security company Wiz is also boosting cloud growth. Google is seeing so much demand that it inked a deal in June with Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, agreeing to pay $920 million a month for AI compute capacity.

— Jordan Novet

Alphabet and its hyperscaler peers are spending boatloads of money on massive data center and related computing projects, and investors are paying close attention.

That puts a particular focus on Alphabet’s capital expenditures, or capex, which has been skyrocketing in recent quarters. In April, the company raised its 2026 capex guidance to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion.

The consensus estimate for Alphabet’s 2026 capex is $187.1 billion, according to FactSet. Among the web giants, Amazon is the only one expected to spend more, with analysts projecting capex of $200 billion, in line with the company’s forecast.

— Jonathan Vanian