Alphabet boosts revenue in Q2 with AI

Google parent Alphabet reported second-quarter revenue of $85 billion, up 14 percent from the same period last year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s productive AI solutions for cloud customers have generated billions of dollars in revenue and are used by more than 2 million developers. Pichai credited AI with boosting “Search” usage and user satisfaction. Google parent Alphabet reported second-quarter revenue of $85 billion, up 14 percent from the same period last year. Google has earned about $85 billion in revenue over the past few months, with revenue from its Search and cloud computing businesses growing rapidly. Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings report showed Search alone brought in $48.5 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, Google’s cloud division reached $10 billion for the first time and also generated $1 billion in operating profit. The growth in cloud revenue shows the company is strengthening its position in the competitive cloud sector, where investment is increasing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s productive AI solutions for cloud customers have generated billions of dollars in revenue and are used by more than 2 million developers. “We’re innovating at every layer of the AI stack,” Pichai said. “Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as the technology evolves and we pursue the many opportunities ahead of us.” Alphabet has maintained that position since it became a $2 trillion company in April. In May, Google began rolling out AI Overviews in Search, powered by the Gemini Large Language Model (LLM). AI Overviews help users compare and evaluate different sources by providing comprehensive insights into complex searches. But users soon realized that the tool was providing odd answers for certain queries, leading Google to manually remove those answers. Despite this, Pichai says that AI Overviews have led to increased Search usage and increased user satisfaction with the results.