Google's transition into the era of artificial intelligence continued to pay off for its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., which on Wednesday (April 29) announced another quarter of the stellar growth that helped to more than double its already lofty market value during the past year.
Alphabet earned US$62.6 billion (S$80.1 billion), or $5.11 per share, during the January to March period, an 81 per cent increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 22 per cent from last year to $109.9 billion. Both numbers easily surpassed the analyst projections that steer investors.
Alphabet's stock price rose more than 6 per cent in extended trading after the numbers came out, setting up the shares to hit a new high during Thursday's regular session. The company's market value currently stands at $4.2 trillion, up from $1.9 trillion just a year ago. If the stock trades in a similar trajectory Thursday, Alphabet's market value could approach $4.5 trillion while creating more than $250 billion in additional shareholder wealth in a single day.
The stock market gains that Alphabet is producing are not being matched by other big AI spenders such as Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta Platforms, whose stock price plunged by about 6 per cent in extended trading after disclosing an investment strategy being second guessed by investors. Meanwhile, Microsoft's shares also dipped, despite posting quarterly results that topped analyst forecasts.
Alphabet's performance in the past quarter CEO Sundar Pichai to celebrate the huge bets that the company has been placing on AI technology during the past three years. Those investments, Pichai said, "are lighting up every part of the business".
As usual, digital ads fuelled by Google's dominant search engine propelled the growth as revenue from those operations shot up 16 per cent from last year's first quarter. It marked the fourth straight quarter that Google's ad sales increased by more than 10 per cent from the previous year.
Google's fastest growing division remains its Cloud division, which has been riding the AI boom to sell more products and services to corporate customers and government agencies such as the deal that it just struck with the US military. Google Cloud's revenue surged 63 per cent from last year to $20 billion.
That growth is a sign that Alphabet's spending spree on AI is producing dividends so far, although investors continue to worry that the Mountain View, California, company and its Big Tech peers are pouring too much money into a still-nascent and unproven technology.
Alphabet, though, is betting that it's better to overspend on AI than being too stingy and risk behind left behind.
In a previous quarterly update released in February, Alphabet disclosed that it's earmarking $175 billion to $185 billion for capital expenditures this year that will largely be devoted to building AI data centres and other tools tied to the technology.
In a reflection of management's confidence in its strategy, Alphabet's top finance executive Anat Ashkenazi told analysts on a conference call that this year's capital expenditures may climb as high as $190 billion. And even if the spending runs that high, Askkenazi said it will "significantly increase" again next year.
All of that would be on top of $91 billion in capital expenditures during 2025.
"The key message is that Alphabet is no longer asking investors to underwrite AI spending on faith," said Investing.com analyst Thomas Monteiro.
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