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Alphabet Tops Second-Quarter Revenue Views, Doubles Capital Spending

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Alphabet Tops Second-Quarter Revenue Views, Doubles Capital Spending

Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) second-quarter revenue beat Wall Street's estimates amid demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure, while the technology giant's capital expenditure doubled year over year.

Revenue increased 24% to $119.80 billion, above the FactSet-polled consensus of $117.07 billion.

Second-quarter per-share earnings rose to $9.11 from $2.31 a year earlier. Other income soared to $97.98 billion from $2.66 billion, driven by a $99.03 billion gain on equity securities.

The Google cloud segment's sales surged 82% to $24.77 billion, driven by strength across enterprise AI solutions and infrastructure, Alphabet said.

The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, Alphabet and Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a statement. Gemini is Google's generative AI chatbot.

Tigress Financial Partners projected another strong quarter for Alphabet driven by AI.

"The (second quarter) is expected to confirm that AI is driving faster adoption and monetization across infrastructure, core ads and consumer products rather than being confined to a single business line," Tigress Chief Market Strategist Ivan Feinseth said Monday ahead of the earnings.

Alphabet's second-quarter capital expenditure doubled year over year to $44.92 billion from $22.45 billion, bringing total capital spending for the first six months of the year to $80.60 billion, the company said in a presentation.

Alphabet revised this year's capital expenditure forecast to between $180 billion and $190 billion in April, up from its previous estimate of $175 billion to $185 billion.

BofA Securities expects Alphabet to increase its 2026 capex outlook range by 5% to $190 billion to $200 billion due to higher prices of memory and other components.

"Alphabet is investing in compute capacity to support significant cloud customer demand, frontier model development, improve the user experience, and drive higher advertiser (return on investment)," BofA analyst Justin Post said in a note last week.

Google services revenue increased 15% annually to $94.54 billion in the second quarter, buoyed by a jump in advertising to $81.63 billion from $71.34 billion, Alphabet said.

The company's shares were down 2.8% in after-hours trading, and were up 9% this year through Wednesday close.

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