- Google had a blockbuster 2025 with its AI models and products gaining momentum.
- With Q4 earnings on Wednesday, all eyes are on AI spend, Cloud wins, and a big Apple deal.
- Wall Street will track whether AI rivals are making a meaningful dent in Google's search dominance.
Google has been on a monumental tear as of late. Can it keep the good times rolling?
When Alphabet reports its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, investors will focus on AI spending, cloud wins, and a big Apple deal.
With Meta projecting its capex for this year to nearly double that of 2025, how high will Google go? The company said in October that it expected capex for 2025 to land between $91 and $93 billion. Investors will track if it sticks to those goals. Google's finance chief, Anat Ashkenazi, also said the company expected a "significant" increase in that number for 2026 and promised we'd hear more on Google's Q4 call this week.
As my colleague Joe Ciolli has observed this earnings season, investors are more willing to forgive big capital spending on AI as long as fundamentals remain chugging along.
That leads to the question of how Google's search advertising business, its core engine, is doing. Are OpenAI and other AI rivals chipping away at its dominance, or is Alphabet's money-printing machine whirring as proudly as ever?
Analysts at Bernstein appeared optimistic in a note this week, writing that they expect Google to have seen an increase in query volume in Q4.
"For Tinuiti's advertisers, Google's US paid click growth was the highest it has been since early 2021," Bernstein analysts wrote, referring to the US marketing agency.
Google's cloud business has also become top billing, as it furiously competes with Amazon and Microsoft to build infrastructure and win crucial AI deals. In Q3, Google said the number of new cloud customers increased by about 34% year over year.
Bernstein analysts predicted big business for cloud off the back of AI sales, its big Anthropic deal, and the ramp-up of its AI chip business, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).
"We also note that the new deal between Anthropic and Google for 'tens of billions of dollars' worth of compute represents upside to Google Cloud growth, regardless of whether the money flows through Cloud deals or outright TPU sales," they wrote.
Speaking of deals, this marks the first earnings report since Google and Apple announced that the iPhone giant will use Google's Gemini AI models for its revamped Siri assistant.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions there. How much does Google get out of the deal? Can Google use query data to train Gemini? Will Apple use Google's data centers and TPU chips?
Hopefully, we'll get a clearer picture of the inner workings of that deal on Wednesday's earnings call.
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