Alphabet’s shares fell 5% on Thursday after the company beat Wall Street’s expectations on earnings and revenue, with artificial intelligence spending projected to increase hugely this year.
The Google parent closed nearly 2% lower on Wednesday. After the bell, Alphabet reported fourth-quarter revenue of $113.83 billion, above the $111.43 billion estimate from analysts polled by LSEG.
Its Google Cloud division had $17.66 billion in revenue versus a forecast of $16.18 billion, according to StreetAccount. YouTube Advertising posted $11.38 billion in revenue versus the estimated $11.84 billion.
The tech giant said it would significantly increase its 2026 capital expenditure to between $175 billion and $185 billion — more than double its 2025 spend. A significant portion of capex spending would go toward investing in AI compute capacity for Google DeepMind.
What analysts are saying
Barclays analysts said in a note Thursday that Infrastructure, DeepMind and Waymo costs “weighed on overall Alphabet profitability,” and will continue to do so in 2026.
“Cloud’s growth is astonishing, measured by any metric: revenue, backlog, API tokens inferenced, enterprise adoption of Gemini. These metrics combined with DeepMind’s progress on the model side, starts to justify the 100% increase in capex in ’26,” they said.
“The AI story is getting better while Search is accelerating – that’s the most important take for GOOG,” they added.
Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note Thursday that Alphabet has “stunned the world” with its huge capex spending plan. “With tech in a current state of flux, it’s not clear whether that’s a good or a bad thing,” they wrote.
Correction: This story has been updated to correct that Alphabet shares were down on Thursday.
