Alphabet Just Spent $85 Billion to Say “We’re Still the Main Character” (Investors Agree)

Hey Google, define main character energy…

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, just just delivered a quarterly earnings beat so polished it could’ve been written by Gemini itself… and then followed it up by lighting $85 billion on fire in the name of AI, Cloud, and keeping Wall Street too confused (and too horned up) to panic. 

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For starters, Alphabet’s Q2 revenue came in at $96.4 billion, smashing the Street’s $94 billion forecast like it was nothing. Earnings per share reported at $2.31 vs. $2.18 expected. Search was up. YouTube was up. Cloud was up. Hell, even “Other Bets”... a.k.a. Google’s experimental tech money pit… managed to eke out a few million in revenue before hemorrhaging $1.25 billion in losses like a few Kohl’s bagholders. 

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So, for a company coming off a stellar beat and making analysts eat their own low-grade dog food (read: estimate), what do they go and do? Sundar Pichai & The Boys respond by saying they are jacking up capital expenditures for 2025 to $85 billion… $10 billion more than the guidance they gave five months ago, and nearly 50% higher than what Wall Street thought back in February. Bigly. For more context, according to CFO Anat Ashkenazi, this spending spree is due to “strong and growing demand” for Google Cloud and AI services… or, translated from Corporate: “If we say ‘AI’ enough, you'll let us spend whatever we want.”

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And spoiler, so far it’s working. Google Cloud revenue popped 32% year over year to $13.6 billion. Search revenue clocked in at $54.1 billion. YouTube brought in $9.8 billion in ads, which is a lot of unskippable misery. And the company’s overall ad revenue surged past $71 billion, proving that people are still Googling things and clicking ads, even if they have to scroll past a Gemini hallucination to get there. To top it all off, Pichai went ahead and boasted that AI is “positively impacting every part of the business,” from YouTube subscriptions to Cloud to the search bar that now spoon-feeds you answers in AI Overviews whether you want them or not.

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Case in point: Apparently, that “Overview” product now has over two billion monthly users. Which either means the product is doing great… or we’re all being involuntarily enrolled while toggling between OnlyFans, Youtube, or Googling “what the hell is a Jet2 holiday experience”. Oh, and for anyone worried about profitability: Alphabet posted net income of $28.2 billion, up nearly 20% year over year. That’s after eating a $1.4 billion legal charge… courtesy of Texas… over Google’s data hoarding tendencies. Speaking of elections, Ashkenazi admitted that Q3 might get a revenue “tailwind” from the U.S. political ad cycle, which benefited from “strong spend on U.S. elections” in late 2024. Sounds legit. 

Overall though, if there’s one real takeaway from this quarter, it’s this: Alphabet is no longer trying to impress investors with restraint. It’s swinging its trillion-dollar hammer with full confidence that if AI is the future, it’s going to be powered by Google servers, processed by Google models, and monetized through Google ads jammed in your AI-generated recipe for “chicken-flavored vegan water.”

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We all thought Alphabet was just trying to play defense… but not anymore. They are playing a full-court press and cashin’ checks and snappin’ necks while doing it. Meaning, keep your eyes on Alphabet as we head into this morning's opening bell and place your bets accordingly. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Google as mentioned in the article.