Newsletter
Earnings season is here and Alphabet just dropped some serious numbers to kick off 2025.
Revenue jumped 12% year-over-year to $90.2 billion, while net income surged 46% to $34.5 billion, blowing past Wall Street expectations.
All of this despite ChatGPT actively eating away at Google’s search share, which generally shows how under-monetised the Google Search experience has historically been.
The deets:
- Core search and ads revenue grew 10% to $50.7 billion.
- YouTube Ads brought in $8.93 billion, up 10.3% YoY.
- Google Cloud revenue soared 28% to $12.3 billion.
- Total ad revenue hit $66.9 billion, up 8.5% from last year.
Some AI success: investors loved to hear that Google’s AI Overviews tool in search now reaches 1.5 billion users monthly—up from 1 billion just six months ago.
The company also announced a $70 billion share buyback and hiked its dividend by 5%.
A buyback is when a company buys its own shares from the market. When that happens, there are fewer shares left—kind of like splitting a pizza among fewer people, so everyone’s slice gets bigger (and more valuable).
Zoom out: Wall Street was waiting for such a rosy earnings report after tariff noise had driven the market crazy. All large tech companies saw stocks get a quick bump on Friday.
Quick note: Alphabet is playing offense. It’s planning a $75 billion investment into AI and infrastructure this year and just bought cybersecurity firm Wiz for $32 billion to fortify its enterprise game.
