Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has demonstrated the resilience of its financial position, supported by artificial intelligence, and announced it is doubling its already massive investments to strengthen its position in the intensifying race among tech giants in 2026.
In the last quarter of 2025, the tech giant headquartered in Mountain View, California, exceeded investor expectations, driven by strong growth in cloud computing business thanks to corporate adoption of the new AI tools it has developed.
The group’s net income reached $34.5 billion from October to December, a 30% increase year-over-year, with record revenue of $113.8 billion. However, these results must be viewed in light of the planned investments for 2026 to keep pace with the race for computing power and data center construction: this amount ranges between $175 and $185 billion, nearly double the record set last year, which is causing concern among some investors.
Alphabet Stock Price Fluctuates
In the hour following the release of these figures, the price of Alphabet stock, which had been on a nearly continuous rise over the past six months, fluctuated between gains and losses in after-hours trading following the close of the Wall Street market.
Revenue for the cloud computing division, which still represents a small part of the group’s overall business but is crucial for assessing the viability of AI investments, reached $17.7 billion, a 48% increase year-over-year.
During a conference call, the group’s CEO reassured investors, some of whom are concerned about the potential runaway expansion of tech giants: “We see our AI investments and infrastructure driving revenue and growth upward across all sectors.”
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In this sector, Google competes with Amazon’s leading AWS, and has also moved very close to Microsoft’s Azure.
Launch of Gemini Version 3
The CEO’s optimism is partly based on the performance of the Gemini AI model after its third version, launched this fall, quickly narrowed the gap with the most popular model, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The CEO stated that the Gemini app “now has over 750 million monthly active users,” while OpenAI says its ChatGPT app has 800 million weekly active users.
Unlike OpenAI, which only sells its AI model and has not yet reached profitability, Google can rely on its massive profits, cash reserves, and integrated technology ecosystem, from infrastructure to services.
Google’s core business, namely search and online advertising, remains the main driver of its revenue, generating $82.3 billion in the last quarter.
The group continues to benefit from a US ruling issued in September that prevented the forced sale of its Chrome browser despite its conviction for monopolizing the online search market. Google appealed this ruling in mid-January, which obligated it to share data with its competitors.
Despite this strong growth, Alphabet’s experimental “Other Bets” division, which includes the self-driving car unit Waymo, incurred a loss of $3.6 billion on revenue that did not exceed $370 million.
Alphabet
The Alphabet, as a concept, refers to a standardized set of letters or characters representing the phonemes of a language. Its history traces back to the Proto-Sinaitic script around 1850 BCE, which evolved into the Phoenician alphabet and later inspired the Greek and Latin writing systems. This innovation fundamentally transformed human communication by enabling more efficient and widespread literacy.
Google
Google is an American multinational technology company founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. It is best known for its search engine, which organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible and useful. The company’s name is a play on the mathematical term “googol,” reflecting its mission to manage vast amounts of data.
Mountain View
Mountain View is a city in California’s Silicon Valley, historically known for its agricultural roots before transforming into a major technology hub. It is home to the Computer History Museum and the original headquarters of companies like Google.
California
California is a state on the west coast of the United States, originally inhabited by numerous Native American tribes before becoming a Spanish colony and later part of Mexico. It was annexed by the U.S. in 1848, the same year the Gold Rush sparked a massive population boom and rapid development. Today, it is known globally for its economic, technological, and cultural influence.
Wall Street
Wall Street is a historic street and financial district in Lower Manhattan, New York City, which became the epicenter of American finance following the 1792 Buttonwood Agreement that established the New York Stock Exchange. Today, it is a global symbol of capitalism and houses the NYSE, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and numerous major financial institutions.
Amazon
The Amazon is a vast tropical rainforest in South America, primarily within Brazil, and is the largest of its kind in the world. It is home to immense biodiversity and has been inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years, with its modern history heavily marked by European exploration and ongoing environmental challenges.
AWS
AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is a comprehensive cloud computing platform launched by Amazon in 2006. It provides on-demand services like computing power, storage, and databases, which revolutionized IT infrastructure by allowing businesses to avoid the expense of maintaining physical data centers.
Microsoft
Microsoft is an American multinational technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975, which became globally dominant through its Windows operating system and Office software suite. It has since expanded into cloud computing, gaming, and hardware, playing a pivotal role in the personal computing revolution and shaping modern digital culture.
Azure
“Azure” is not a widely recognized specific place or cultural site, so it may refer to a general concept or a local establishment. If it is intended as a name for a location, such as a hotel, resort, or area, its history would be particular to that specific entity. Without further context, a definitive summary cannot be provided.
Gemini
Gemini is a prominent cultural and entertainment complex located in Moscow, Russia, which opened in 2014. It is known for its large multiplex cinema, concert halls, and diverse event spaces, built on the site of the former “Kodak Kinomir” cinema.
OpenAI
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory founded in 2015, with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It is known for developing advanced AI models like GPT and DALL-E, and it transitioned from a non-profit to a “capped-profit” structure to attract investment while maintaining its core safety-focused principles.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI, first released in November 2022 as part of the GPT-3.5 series. It is built on a transformer architecture trained on vast datasets, designed to generate human-like text and assist with a wide range of conversational tasks.
Chrome
Chrome is a web browser developed by Google, first released in 2008. It was designed for speed, security, and stability, and its introduction popularized the minimalist design and multi-process architecture now common in modern browsers.
Waymo
Waymo is an American autonomous driving technology company that originated as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009. It became a standalone subsidiary under Alphabet Inc. in 2016 and is known for developing and operating a commercial robotaxi service in several U.S. cities.
