Alphabet aka Google (GOOG) recently reported its second quarter results that beat analyst estimates driven by strong and profitable growth in Google Cloud. Its quarterly Cloud revenues crossed the $10 billion mark for the first time and operating income crossed the $1 billion mark.

Google’s Financials

Alphabet’s second quarter revenue grew 14% to $84.74 billion, beating analyst estimates of $84.19 billion. Net income grew 29% to $23.62 billion or $1.89 per share, beating analyst estimates of $1.84 per share. 

By segment, revenues from Google Services that includes Search, Advertising, Android, Chrome, Hardware, Google Maps, Google Play, and YouTube ads grew 11.5% to $73.9 billion. Advertising revenue grew 11% to $64.6 billion. Revenue from YouTube ads grew 13% to $8.66 billion missing analyst estimates of $8.93 billion. Network advertising revenues fell 5% to $7.44 billion. Operating income from the Google Services segment was $29.6 billion compared to $23.4 billion a year ago.

Google Cloud revenues grew 29% to $10.35 billion ahead of analyst estimates of $10.2 billion. Operating income was $1.17 billion, compared to $395 million a year ago. 

Revenues from Other Bets grew 28% to $365 million. Operating loss was $1.13 billion, compared to $813 million a year ago.

Google’s AI Strategy

During the earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the company’s AI strategy. Google is bringing AI to everyone. All six of Google’s core products with over 2 billion monthly users now use Gemini. Gemini is powering features in Search, Workspace, Google Messages, and more. He said that over 1.5 million developers are now using Gemini across its developer tools. 

Its enterprise AI platform, Vertex, helps customers such as Deutsche Bank, Kingfisher, and the U.S. Air Force build powerful AI agents. Last quarter, it announced a number of new advances and broadened support for third-party models including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and open-source models like Gemma 2, Llama, and Mistral.

Its AI-powered applications portfolio is helping it win new customers and drive upsell. Its conversational AI platform has gained customers like Best Buy and Gordon Food Service. Gemini for Workspace helps Click Therapeutics analyze patient feedback as they build targeted digital treatments. Software engineers at Wipro are using Gemini Code Assist to develop, test and document software faster. And data analysts at Mercado Libre are using BigQuery and Looker to optimize capacity planning and fulfill shipments faster. 

Google continues to invest in designing and building robust and efficient infrastructure to support its AI strategy. In May, Google launched Trillium, the sixth generation of its custom AI accelerator. It achieves about a 5x increase in peak compute performance per chip and is 67% more energy efficient compared to TPU v5e. The latest NVIDIA Blackwell platform is expected to be available in Google Cloud in early 2025.

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