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Google parent Alphabet has posted strong third-quarter 2025 results, fuelled by a surge in AI-powered advances across Search and Cloud, which are reshaping its core business. “This was a terrific quarter for Alphabet, driven by double-digit growth across every major part of our business. We’re seeing AI now driving real business results across the company,” said Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet and Google, in a blog post. “We delivered our first-ever $100 billion quarter. Five years ago our quarterly revenue was at $50 billion. Our revenue number has doubled since then, and we’re firmly in the generative AI era,” he said. The company raised its full-year capital expenditure forecast for the third time this year to between $91 billion and $93 billion, citing broad business growth and surging demand from Cloud customers. The California-based company, which invested $52.5 billion in 2024, has steadily raised its capex forecast this year, from $75 billion in February to $85 billion in July, and now to its latest projection. “We are investing to meet customer demand and capitalise on the growing opportunities across the company,” Pichai remarked. Tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have significantly ramped up capital spending to expand server and data centre infrastructure, driven by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and its soaring computing requirements. Earlier today, Meta said its capital spending is expected to increase substantially in 2026, following a 2025 capex projection of $70 billion–$72 billion. Alphabet’s Q3 revenue surged 15.9% year-on-year to $102.3 billion, while its net profit in the quarter rose 33% YoY to $35 billion. The majority of Alphabet’s revenue continues to come from Google advertising. In the third quarter, its ad revenue, including Google Search, YouTube ads, and Google Network, increased 12.6% YoY to $74.2 billion. The company’s revenue from Google Search, its largest business, increased 14.5% to $56.6 billion in Q3. Meanwhile, YouTube ad sales climbed 15% to $10.3 billion during the quarter. “AI is driving an expansionary moment for Search,” Pichai noted. “During the Q2 call we shared that overall queries and commercial queries continued to grow year over year. This growth rate increased in Q3, largely driven by our AI investments in Search, most notably AI Overviews and AI Mode.” He added that, in the last quarter, the company launched AI Mode globally in 40 languages, reaching over 75 million daily active users. Driving AI capabilities In line with the broader industry trends, Google has made AI a strategic priority, consistently expanding its AI capabilities and integrating them across its core products. Google has been advancing its AI through the Gemini family of multimodal, hybrid reasoning models, developed by the unified DeepMind and Brain teams. “Gemini 2.5 Pro, Veo, Genie 3 and our viral sensation, Nano Banana, are among the very best in class. Over 230 million videos have been generated with Veo 3, and more than 13 million developers have built with our generative models,” said Pichai, adding that the company plans to release Gemini 3 later this year. Google’s first-party Gemini models now process 7 billion tokens per minute through direct API usage, and the Gemini app has surpassed 650 million monthly active users, with query volume tripling since Q2. According to Pichai, Google now processes over 1.3 quadrillion tokens each month, a more than 20× increase YoY from 980 trillion in July. This quarter, the company advanced its vision of an AI-powered Chrome by deeply integrating Gemini and AI Mode in Search, with more agentic capabilities on the way. Competitors have also been moving fast, with Microsoft launching Copilot Mode in Edge, Perplexity debuting its AI browser Comet, and OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Atlas earlier this month. Cloud and beyond “Cloud had another great quarter of accelerating growth with AI revenue as a key driver,” Pichai remarked. Google’s cloud business witnessed a 33.5% YoY jump in revenue, touching $15.2 billion in Q3. Operating income in the cloud division surged to $3.6 billion, growing 84.6% YoY. Google remains a key player in the cloud computing industry, competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. He noted that new Google Cloud Platform customers grew nearly 34% year over year, with more billion-dollar deals signed through Q3 than in the previous two years combined, and that over 70% of existing Google Cloud customers now use its AI offerings. Pichai said that in Q3, revenue from products powered by the company’s generative AI models rose over 200% year over year. Over the past year, nearly 150 Google Cloud customers each processed around 1 trillion tokens for diverse use cases, and the company now has more than 2 million subscribers across 700 organisations. During the period, Other Bets, encompassing the Waymo driverless taxi service, witnessed a slight decrease in revenue, to $344 million. The division also incurred a loss of $1.4 billion. Next year, Waymo plans to launch in London, expand to Tokyo, and add its service in Dallas, Nashville, Denver, and Seattle. It has also secured approval for fully autonomous operations at San Jose and San Francisco airports. Testing will continue to scale in New York City, according to Pichai. As of September 30, 2025, Alphabet’s employee count was 1,90,167 up from 1,81,269. (Edited by Swetha Kannan)
