Alphabet reported second-quarter 2026 earnings on July 22, 2026, with revenue up 24% year-over-year, driven by 17% growth in Search revenue and a 13% rise in YouTube advertising revenue — a strong quarter by most measures, though the stock still fell in reaction, largely on the back of a much larger spending commitment CEO Sundar Pichai announced alongside the results. Alphabet raised its 2026 data-center capital expenditure guidance from a prior range of $185 billion to a new range of up to $205 billion, one of the largest single upward revisions to AI infrastructure spending any major tech company has made this year.
Pichai used the earnings call to highlight concrete adoption numbers behind that spending rather than just future promises. Antigravity, Google’s AI-powered coding tool, has surpassed 2.4 million weekly active users, a real usage figure in a coding-assistant category increasingly crowded with competitors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. Pichai also confirmed to analysts that Google is already dedicating meaningful resources to developing Gemini 4, the next major version of its flagship AI model family, even as Gemini’s current generation continues rolling out across Google’s own products and enterprise customers — a signal that Google does not intend to slow its model-development cadence even as competition intensifies from every other major AI lab.
Waymo’s Path to Actually Making Money
Beyond the immediate earnings numbers, Pichai has continued to point to Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous-vehicle subsidiary, as a genuine future profit center rather than a pure research project. In an earlier all-hands meeting, Pichai told Google employees he expects Waymo to “meaningfully” contribute to Alphabet’s overall financial results as soon as 2027 — a specific, dated commercial expectation for a business that has operated for years primarily as a long-term bet rather than a near-term revenue driver, and one that puts real pressure on Waymo’s own operational scaling timeline over the next 18 months.
Gemini Is Closing In on a Billion Users
The spending increase comes as Google’s consumer AI products show real, measurable momentum against competitors. Google reported more than 950 million monthly active users for the Gemini app during its Q2 2026 earnings call, up from roughly 750 million earlier in the year, while its AI Overviews feature in Search now reaches an estimated 2 billion monthly users, appearing in as much as 60% of U.S. search queries. Market-share data for AI assistants shows ChatGPT’s share falling below 50% for the first time in the first half of 2026, while Gemini’s share rose to 27.7% over the same period — evidence that Google’s aggressive spending is translating into real user growth, not just infrastructure for its own sake. On the enterprise side, Gemini Enterprise has reached more than 8 million paid seats across roughly 2,800 companies, with about 13 million developers building on Google’s generative AI models.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
Alphabet’s near-$205 billion capex commitment is a concrete signal of how much larger the AI infrastructure buildout is likely to get before it levels off, and it directly affects the cost and availability of the cloud compute Philippine AI startups actually run on — Google Cloud is one of the three hyperscalers most Philippine tech companies choose between. Antigravity’s 2.4 million weekly users is also a useful, real data point for any Philippine developer or startup deciding which AI coding assistant to standardize on: a tool with genuine, verified adoption at that scale is a safer long-term bet for a team’s own workflow than a newer, less-proven entrant, all else being equal. Pichai’s continued Gemini 4 investment, even while Gemini’s current generation is still being adopted, is also a reminder that any Philippine product built on top of a specific AI model API should expect that underlying model to keep changing meaningfully, not settle into a stable, unchanging baseline any time soon. The competitive dynamic between Gemini and ChatGPT crossing 50% market share is also worth watching directly for any Philippine team currently defaulting to a single AI assistant for internal or customer-facing use — the underlying market itself is still shifting meaningfully quarter to quarter, not settled around one dominant provider. Search revenue growth of 17% is itself a notable data point on its own — Google’s core advertising business, the one many analysts expected AI chatbots to cannibalize most directly, is still growing at a healthy clip even as AI Overviews reshape how results are actually presented to users. YouTube advertising revenue growth of 13% tells a similar story on the video side of Alphabet’s business, suggesting the company’s two largest historical revenue engines are both still expanding even as the company redirects an increasing share of its overall spending toward AI infrastructure rather than those core businesses directly. That combination — core advertising and video businesses still growing while AI investment scales sharply alongside them — is the specific pattern Wall Street appears to be rewarding across the industry’s largest players this earnings season, and one worth any Philippine founder studying when framing their own growth story to investors.
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