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
Their Capex went up 43% YoY to $17.20 billion likely from higher investment in AI infrastructure.
The interesting story is their margin expansion. They were consistently at 32% margin for multiple quarters. This time they broke out to 34%
Finally, a new $70 billion share repurchase plan and a 5% increase in the quarterly dividend to $0.21 per share.
source: https://signalbloom.ai/news/GOOGL/alphabet-q1-earnings-surge...
disclaimer: I run this site, it was launched on HN recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675248
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.
No doubt that's a huge number.
Google's TPUs, GPUs, and other tech hardware probably has a pretty short usable life where it doesn't make financials sense (in terms of powering it and cooling it) to use it at all after a few years.
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.
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.
Hasn't happened yet you say, but yet they have the best model right now, with rumors about "claybrook" circulating on webdev arena being even better than their already-the-best-in-the-market SOTA model.
If Google have not even started yet, and they're currently way ahead of the pack, then this sounds like a good thing to me.
bearjaws•9mo ago
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.
sanp•9mo ago
lazharichir•9mo ago
bobxmax•9mo ago
They've caught up and even surpassed Open AI.
riku_iki•9mo ago
harmmonica•9mo ago
Sounds like ChatGPT has 10 million (paying?) subscribers across their products. Does Google have an analog subscription service ("AI Premium" sounds like one, but I've heard no publicity about their subs)? If they don't have a direct analog, has Google also surpassed ChatGPT with some kind of productization of their AI offerings? If they have, can someone educate me on what that/those products are? I realize AI is, for better or worse, baked into every Google product.
Maybe there're add-ons in, for instance, GCP for those offerings that companies are leveraging, but just trying to understand if this is another case where Google has actually pulled back ahead tech-wise, but still hasn't figured out how to productize it.
edit: grammar
xnx•9mo ago
From what I can tell, (I don't use ChatGPT) Google has every feature OpenAI has, and then a lot more included in other Google products.
Google may not have as many distinct paying AI customers because they get it for free (e.g. college students) or as part of another subscription.
bobxmax•9mo ago
However model capabilities, and especially now that they're integrating Gemini into Google Search (which was a disaster initially, but improving now) the Googlefying is happening.
It'll be curious what they do with projects like Imagen and Veo though.
verdverm•9mo ago
Every Google Workspace customer is getting access to the Gemini lineup. That's a pretty big user base