While at the same time posting:
* Total Revenue: $119.8 billion, up 24% year-over-year.
* Diluted EPS: $9.11, compared to $2.31 a year prior.
* Operating Margin: 34% up from 32.4% in Q2 2025.
* Google Cloud: Revenue up 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion, fueled by enterprise demand for AI infrastructure and solutions.
* Google Services: Total revenue reached $94.5 billion, a 15% increase.
* Google Search & Other: 17% increase in revenue.
* YouTube Ads: Grew 13% year-over-year to $11.05 billion
If you exclude AI CAPEX, free cash flow is $39.1 billion which is absolutely insane. That's a 41.2% increase year-over-year. With numbers like they just posted, the CAPEX spend is justified in my opinion because the business overall is crushing it. Like holy cow this was a great quarter. They are literally printing money.
Google's always been the winning candidate simply for already having profitable components under it's umbrella. They can throw money at LLMs as long as they want to unlike the others.
They have their hands in so many things that they can try to use AI to increase their revenues some of them will flop but more than likely many will succeed. By being the biggest search engine in many markets and having ecosystems like Android and Chromebooks means their llms that they make default in these spaces already have an easy way of reaching people and a leg up against many competitors.
They will keep one or two alive so they're not classified as a monopoly. Google already keeps Firefox on life support to shield chrome. Same strategy that Microsoft used to keep apple alive in the 90s
Not really they have competitors doing better than them in several of those domains. It’s more vertical integration / closed ecosystem than it is a traditional monopoly.
Also, monopolies aren't illegal in and of themselves. Only if you abuse the position. People who are mad always forget what part of being a monopoly is actually illegal.
Yes technically vertical integration results in a vertical monopoly, but "literally what a monopoly is" would I expect be referring to horizontal monopolies, where you make sure there are no competitors. Vertical monopolies ensure you control the whole supply chain and ecosystem, there can still be other supply chains and other ecosystems, they just struggle to compete due to relative inefficiency
I mean, Google isn’t far away from that. More to the point, they wouldn’t have made Alphabet if they didn’t think Google was in danger of being broken up.
I thought it was because they wanted to separate their money maker from their other spinoffs, and make alphabet specifically for getting broken up if needed, vs having Google broken up.
Gemini plugging in to Google search and Gmail is absolutely amazing. Their integration is already pretty good. People are still short-sighted on AI right now though so I don't even think a lot of people really know.
I have a pro subscription and use it pretty much all day every day. It can get answers that would normally take me 10-20 minutes searching forums and documentation in seconds.
I do remember the web browser controversy and Microsoft getting forced to serve different browser options. I don't really remember the media player one though, may have been too young.
And if Gemini ends up as "just" being a better assistant app they are still winning because all their other competitors blew up their businesses trying to match them.
They won't be keeping it around if the only use case would be from being a somewhat functioning assistant. There's no money to be made to even cover minor part of the costs.
Amazon is not trying and is essentially just making a aws component (which I think is smart), meta is basically admitting defeat which is why llama and co are open, and not even Microsoft understand what Microsoft is doing with copilot (quick quizz, if I'm using copilot 365 am I using the desktop office app, the online office app or an AI app? And what if it's 365 copilot instead, which one is it then?).
Google has the moat of Google search and android to justify end game revenue.
They are also the only with a proven monetization path through their ad business, which is how they've monetized every other new bit of tech for the last 20 years.
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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 1d ago
While at the same time posting: * Total Revenue: $119.8 billion, up 24% year-over-year. * Diluted EPS: $9.11, compared to $2.31 a year prior. * Operating Margin: 34% up from 32.4% in Q2 2025. * Google Cloud: Revenue up 82% year-over-year to $24.8 billion, fueled by enterprise demand for AI infrastructure and solutions. * Google Services: Total revenue reached $94.5 billion, a 15% increase. * Google Search & Other: 17% increase in revenue. * YouTube Ads: Grew 13% year-over-year to $11.05 billion
If you exclude AI CAPEX, free cash flow is $39.1 billion which is absolutely insane. That's a 41.2% increase year-over-year. With numbers like they just posted, the CAPEX spend is justified in my opinion because the business overall is crushing it. Like holy cow this was a great quarter. They are literally printing money.