Alphabet shares surged after hours following a huge, across the board beat tonight, topping $2000 for the first time.

Top- and Bottom-lines surged (with revenues up 23% YoY)...

• 4Q EPS $22.30, Est. $15.58
• 4Q Rev. $56.90B, Est. $53.54B

Additionally, Revenue in "Other Bets," the category that includes Waymo, comes in at $196 million, beating estimates of $176.2 million. That unit lost $1.14 billion, which is less than the $1.74 billion loss that Wall Street anticipated.

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Most eyes were on the Cloud line item which while it beat, it was only a very modest beat...

• 4Q Google Cloud Rev. $3.83B, Est. $3.80B

Google Cloud reported an operating loss of $1.24 billion (worse than the $1.19 billion in the same period last year), due to the division’s costly efforts to expand its workforce and network capacity.

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Fourth Quarter margins and operating income also crushed expectations...

• 4Q Oper Margin 28%, Est. 23.4%
• 4Q Oper Income $15.65B, Est. $11.97B

All of which sent GOOGL shares soaring...

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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, says:

“Our strong results this quarter reflect the helpfulness of our products and services to people and businesses, as well as the accelerating transition to online services and the cloud. Google succeeds when we help our customers and partners succeed, and we see significant opportunities to forge meaningful partnerships as businesses increasingly look to a digital future.”

Ruth Porat, CFO of Google and Alphabet, says:

“Our strong fourth quarter performance, with revenues of $56.9 billion, was driven by Search and YouTube, as consumer and business activity recovered from earlier in the year. Google Cloud revenues were $13.1 billion for 2020, with significant ongoing momentum, and we remain focused on delivering value across the growth opportunities we see.”

Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Tech Analyst Mandeep Singh concluded that:

“This quarter was all about advertising. Google Cloud could outperform going ahead, but the core ad business is so strong.”

Finally, we note the rather stunning fact that Alphabet has 135,301 employees (as of Dec. 31) up from 118,899 a year earlier.