An earnings thread on HN? Time for Faramir, captain of Gondor to show his quality!<p>The nominal EPS beat appears massive but an important caveat on that EPS beat: a significant portion of this EPS outperformance stemmed from a non-operational item: an $8.0 billion unrealized gain on a non-marketable equity security, which added $7.7 billion to net income, equivalent to $0.62 per share. Although even without this, they would be beating the consensus estimates<p>Their Capex went up 43% YoY to $17.20 billion likely from higher investment in AI infrastructure.<p>The interesting story is their margin expansion. They were consistently at 32% margin for multiple quarters. This time they broke out to 34%<p>Finally, a new $70 billion share repurchase plan and a 5% increase in the quarterly dividend to $0.21 per share.<p>source: <a href="https://signalbloom.ai/news/GOOGL/alphabet-q1-earnings-surge-past-estimates-boosted-by-8b-gain-as-cloud-growth-holds-at-28" rel="nofollow">https://signalbloom.ai/news/GOOGL/alphabet-q1-earnings-surge...</a><p>disclaimer: I run this site, it was launched on HN recently <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675248">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675248</a>
Google / Alphabet will be a strong contender going forward in generative AI. Vertex AI is a pretty decent platform, but Gemini 2.5 pro and Gemini Flash are excellent.<p>I've been leveraging 2.0 Flash for processing help desk type tickets with long comment chains and its speed / performance is excellent. The only thing I find strange is multi-turn prompts tend to fall apart.
Google is now sitting on a pile of nearly $100 billion in cash and <i>half a trillion dollars</i> in total assets.<p>No deep thoughts on what this means, just general astonishment at how big megacorps are today. Remember, these figures are not fuzzy notional "market cap" or something, but cold hard cash for the first and real world assets that could be sold off and turned into cold hard cash for the second.
Are expected outcomes of the multiple monopoly trials already priced-in? I'm long on Google because their AI tech is the best and real world implementations like Waymo are so far ahead of everyone else.
Obviously amazing results but its again that time when its feeling like this is about a legacy company.<p>The establishment apparently isn't even picking up the AI revolution yet as more than half of their revenue comes from Search, which is something that I rarely use these days. If they have any AI revenue, it must be a subset in a subset of their businesses.<p>So much potential for the AI transformation and although it is the prime topic for many many people apparently it even hasn't started yet.