My TL;DR: Ridiculously steady. Revenue up 14% YoY (same as last year), operating margin 32% (same as last year).
Cloud up from 10B to 13B, over doubling profits from 1.1B to 2.8B.
No sign of material Waymo revenue in Other Bets, which (slightly) increased its loss.
Continuing to plow insane amounts of money into data centers, with $25B "purchases of property and equipment" in Q2 alone, twice the figure last year.
jeffbee•6mo ago
Interesting that Waymo ridership growth isn't moving other bets revenue. Verily must be bigger than I thought.
Also interesting that actual tech company earnings get zero comments while the earnings of Tesla, a car company that remarkets Asian batteries and is in no sense a tech firm, get 1000 comments.
harmmonica•6mo ago
I'm glad you pointed out the lack of engagement on this topic. Here I was thinking "everyone" who's even remotely interested in AI (based on the comments on AI posts I would think that would be "everyone" on HN) would want to know how Google is faring in this new world. There was just an article on the front page about how clicks were massively down when AI snippets are at the top of search results. I, for one, was really interested in knowing how Google would be able to withstand what seems to be a ton of folks opting to use LLMs in lieu of search. This earnings report says they're faring pretty well (of course the mass of people have obviously not yet replaced search with LLMs).
I personally still don't necessarily think Google can continue to thread the needle, but that's entirely vibes-based. If they can somehow continue to grow GCP; direct AI snippet/Gemini traffic to clicking links they lose from traditional search results; and that it's actually true that LLMs are not yet good for the higher cpc links (some speculation about that) then maybe they can successfully navigate this transition.
And at the risk of shouting into a void re your first point, how do you (the general you) reconcile Tesla's market cap and general interest in their business? Tesla EVs are currently a drag on Tesla's growth so then you have robotaxi and Optimus as the hoped-for drivers of growth. And then Waymo somehow is an afterthought for Google earnings (at least at this point). Tesla's market cap says that there's enough belief that robotaxi really will roll out very aggressively and therefore robotaxi is a big enough business to justify some major percentage of Tesla's long-term future. Because, absent robotaxi capturing a major chunk of the market, you're left with Optimus/AI-enabled robots being all of Tesla's growth story? A product or suite of products that doesn't even exist yet? I guess the reply to all of that is what everyone says: it's a meme stock at this point.
rakejake•6mo ago
Gemini is apparently doing pretty well. 400 monthly active users on their app and they recently increased the prices for their API.
Sundar Pichai has taken a lot of heat in the past couple years (and for good reason) but distribution is one of his main strengths. Now that they are back to being SOTA on the models, they can fallback on their bread and butter.
I think ChatGPT is still going to be a major player considering the amount of mindshare they have but I tend to fall on the side that thinks there's room for multiple players in the AI game.
harmmonica•6mo ago
I actually didn't know that 400 million number. Substantial obviously even without knowing exactly how they're defining active and how "unique" that number is (installs of the app? Does it come stock on Android somehow?). And I would've been one of the folks (glibly?) criticizing Sundar's leadership, a big part of which was because they seemed to be caught flat-footed when OpenAI took off even though they had the SOTA tech even before ChatGPT was released.
That said, it does seem like they're somehow managing through this pretty well with this earnings call being the first clear indication of it. Will they be able to continue to do that? I guess that's partially up to them maintaining parity, or better, with the competition (not that folks are going to jump overnight from one provider to another without some earth-shattering advancement).
Definitely agree and I guess hope that there will be room for multiple players in this.
rakejake•6mo ago
If Google can fend off the US DoJ, I think they're going to be just fine.
decimalenough•6mo ago
Cloud up from 10B to 13B, over doubling profits from 1.1B to 2.8B.
No sign of material Waymo revenue in Other Bets, which (slightly) increased its loss.
Continuing to plow insane amounts of money into data centers, with $25B "purchases of property and equipment" in Q2 alone, twice the figure last year.
jeffbee•6mo ago
Also interesting that actual tech company earnings get zero comments while the earnings of Tesla, a car company that remarkets Asian batteries and is in no sense a tech firm, get 1000 comments.
harmmonica•6mo ago
I personally still don't necessarily think Google can continue to thread the needle, but that's entirely vibes-based. If they can somehow continue to grow GCP; direct AI snippet/Gemini traffic to clicking links they lose from traditional search results; and that it's actually true that LLMs are not yet good for the higher cpc links (some speculation about that) then maybe they can successfully navigate this transition.
And at the risk of shouting into a void re your first point, how do you (the general you) reconcile Tesla's market cap and general interest in their business? Tesla EVs are currently a drag on Tesla's growth so then you have robotaxi and Optimus as the hoped-for drivers of growth. And then Waymo somehow is an afterthought for Google earnings (at least at this point). Tesla's market cap says that there's enough belief that robotaxi really will roll out very aggressively and therefore robotaxi is a big enough business to justify some major percentage of Tesla's long-term future. Because, absent robotaxi capturing a major chunk of the market, you're left with Optimus/AI-enabled robots being all of Tesla's growth story? A product or suite of products that doesn't even exist yet? I guess the reply to all of that is what everyone says: it's a meme stock at this point.
rakejake•6mo ago
Sundar Pichai has taken a lot of heat in the past couple years (and for good reason) but distribution is one of his main strengths. Now that they are back to being SOTA on the models, they can fallback on their bread and butter.
I think ChatGPT is still going to be a major player considering the amount of mindshare they have but I tend to fall on the side that thinks there's room for multiple players in the AI game.
harmmonica•6mo ago
That said, it does seem like they're somehow managing through this pretty well with this earnings call being the first clear indication of it. Will they be able to continue to do that? I guess that's partially up to them maintaining parity, or better, with the competition (not that folks are going to jump overnight from one provider to another without some earth-shattering advancement).
Definitely agree and I guess hope that there will be room for multiple players in this.
rakejake•6mo ago