Google just reported another blockbuster quarter, with its fourth-quarter revenue soaring past Wall Street expectations,
That said, you might not think it to look at the stock, which took a dip after Google announced it planned to double its capital expenditure in 2026, predicting it will spend between $175 billion and $185 billion — far beyond analysts’ prior expectations.
Some upbeat numbers softened the blow, with Google’s search advertising and cloud business running hot. Google announced its annual revenue had exceeded $400 billion for the first time, while quarterly revenue hit $113.8 billion, above estimates of $111 billion. Google Cloud became a particularly bright spot, with revenues up 48% year over year.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Alphabet’s earnings call.
Google is a big spender
Let’s get the big one out of the way. Google said on Wednesday that it expects capital expenditures of between $175 billion and $185 billion in 2026. That’s the money going to data centers, chips, construction materials, and other components needed to build out and support Google’s AI efforts.
It’s a huge figure. Google previously warned that its capex spend would be higher than last year’s, when it spent just over $90 billion. Its updated guidance for 2026 surpassed street expectations and sent the stock tumbling 2% after its otherwise very healthy earnings report.
Google’s capex estimate is even higher than Meta’s, which last week said it expects to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion for 2026, nearly doubling its spend from last year.
Gemini rising
Google said its Gemini app now has over 750 million monthly active users. That’s 100 million more than it had in October last year.
“We are also seeing significantly higher engagement per user, especially since the launch of Gemini 3 in December,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the call on Wednesday.
While the graph trends in the right direction, it also suggests a slowdown, as Google said in October that it had gained 200 million extra users over Q3, aided by the rollout of its viral Nano Banana image generator.
A subscriptions business to match Netflix
Google said on Wednesday that it now has over 325 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services, with Google One and YouTube Premium the most popular.
To put that number in perspective, Netflix announced last month it had also hit 325 million subscribers. It’s not a total like-for-like comparison — Netflix doesn’t have a cloud storage product, for one. Still, with YouTube clearly taking a big chunk of those users, it should be enough to alarm Netflix’s leaders.
It’s making AI cheaper to run
Google likes to talk up its full-stack AI advantage. By owning everything from AI models to cloud servers and chips, Google gains more control over the technology and how it all fits together.
On Wednesday’s call, Pichai flagged that Google was seeing significant benefits from this, lowering Gemini’s serving unit costs by 78% over 2025 “through model optimizations, efficiency, and utilization improvements.”
CEO Sundar Pichai says SaaS wipeout is overblown
Software stocks took a hammering this week after Anthropic rolled out new features that could perform clerical and administrative tasks for people in the legal industry.
Could this be another “DeepSeek moment,” as Evercore senior managing director Mark Mahaney suggested on the call? Pichai suggested the scramble this week might be overblown.
“I think it is an enabling tool, just like it has been an enabling tool for us across our products and services, be it Search, YouTube, etc,” Pichai said of Gemini, saying that companies that are “seizing the moment” will “have the same opportunity ahead.”
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