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Alphabet’s actions decreased sharply after slowing down the Google Parent cloud business and plans to spend $ 75 billion this year in the creation of capacity for artificial intelligence products without nerves.
At the last minute on Tuesday, Alphabet reported two digit increases in revenues and profits of the fourth quarter, driven by its main advertising business. But investors focused on a disappointing room for their vast unit in the cloud, which runs the Google data centers.
The cloud division recorded a 30 percent increase in revenues to almost $ 12 billion, but this was slower than the 35 percent growth rate in the previous three months, and below $ analysts of $ 12.2 billion had predicted. The financial director Anat Ashkenazi blamed this “more demand for available capacity.”
However, the scale of expenditure related to Google’s AI to meet this demand surprised the market. The capital expenditure of the fourth quarter increased to $ 14.3 billion, compared to $ 11 billion last year and exceeding the expectations of $ 13.2 billion.
Google’s executive director, Like Pichai, said that spending on data and servers centers would accelerate to $ 75 billion this year, compared to $ 53 billion in 2024 and a third more than Wall Street had estimated.
“The cost of using (AI) will continue to decrease, which will make the most extraordinary use cases feasible,” said Pichai, denying that the company was spending propiently. “That is the space of opportunity. It is as great as it seems, and that is why you see us invest to fulfill that moment. “
Alphabet’s shares fell up to 8 percent in the negotiation outside the schedule, leaving it on the way to the fifth day of negotiation in the last decade and cleaning around $ 200 billion of its market capitalization. Even so, the action had previously increased 45 percent in the last 12 months, valuing it by $ 2.5TN only behind Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon.
Alphabet’s fall echoed Microsoft last week, which also lost $ 200 billion in market value after cloud growth estimates were also lost and said that the expenditure of AI would reach $ 80 one billion in his fiscal year that ended on June 30. On the same day, the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, promised to spend “hundreds of billions” more to remain at the forefront of AI investigation.
The market reaction reflects broader concerns about spending on American groups that build and operate the vast data centers full of advanced chips that claim that they are needed to train and execute the models of large languages of AI.
The sale of Alphabet is also based on the doubts sown last month by a new model of the new Deepseek company, which claimed to achieve comparable yield for the US leaders. UU. Including the Gemini of Google, the chatgpt of Openi and the claude of Anthrope with a reduced budget using much less advanced. Nvidia Chips.
Pichai said Depseek had a “tremendous team” that had shown that “you can conduct a lot of efficiency to serve these (AI) models really well.”
He also sent the analysts’ questions about GEMINI and their rivals are cannibaling their main search business, since users use more and more chatbots to find information and answers online, which avoids the need to click on the ads that They support their free service.
There is still little evidence that your dominant search engine is challenged. Advertising income linked to the search increased 13 percent to $ 54 billion in the quarter, exceeding estimates, backed by another quarter of advertising growth on YouTube.
In general, group revenues increased 12 percent to $ 96.5 billion in the fourth quarter compared to the same period of three months of the previous year. Excluding the traffic acquisition costs paid to advertising and devices, that figure was $ 81.6 billion, missing Wall Street estimates of $ 82.8 billion in a Bloomberg survey. Net income increased by 28 percent to $ 26.5 billion.
Google is also in the sights of regulators around the world. The company faces the possibility of breaking after losing a historical case presented by the United States Department of Justice, which resulted in a decision that its search business had been involved in monopolistic behavior.
This week it was learned that China had revived antitrust research in the Android Google mobile operating system, assaulting its Beijing office in a movement that has been interpreted as leverage in tariff negotiations with the president of the United States, Donald Trump.