Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf]

Impressive growth, and even more, ahem, impressive capital spending :-O

According to page 6, year to date in 2026, operations generated $127B in cash, and capital spending on property and equipment was $132B, so year to date, the business consumed $5B.

According to page 8, in the last quarter, operations generated $42B and capital spending was $51B, so over the past three months, the business consumed $9B.

Those figures don't include any capital spending made through off-balance sheet arrangements. No idea what those might be, or for how much Alphabet could be on the hook.

I'm curious to see if all that money invested in infrastructure will pay off. I hope it pays off, for everyone's sake, but hope is not certainty.

Ad sales fall because the AI mania has made it clear that Big Tech does not care about humans, so humans go elsewhere.

Advertisers on the other hand are alerted to viewbotting with increasingly sophisticated AI "users".

It was clear already two years ago that the model of AI generated "content" that is watched by AI viewbots does not work. Of course Big Tech has to steam forward and find out the hard way.

Congrats, you have ruined the entire SV business model with your fantasies derived from cheap, horribly written SciFi novels.

Meh I bought the dip. Google has such giant moats. I’m still hugely long tech.

...and the stock falls 8% in after-hours trading.

Google makes a shitton of money with the same ol' click ads--same as in 2004. But with a bunch of other stuff added, like AI spending.

... and immediately crashed 10% down.

1. Cloud killed it.

2. Youtube meh, like always (weird that it doesn't kill it)

3. Search -- this was the issue. QonQ 0.1% <-- the whole story

Everyone has expected Search to, sooner or later, crack. This looks like it may be it.

If Google had 30B in revenue from coding tools and a few billion from Gemini Enterprise then there would be a story that Google could get through this.

But GDM didn't execute. And that's that.

Who knows the bottom. More than 10-15% seems unlikely. But if search cracks again next quarter then we'll see a real revaluing of the business.

Google did not have the proper focus on AI. They should have owned the space. But there were clearly management issues.

why do people on HN hate AI so much?

TLDR; Alphabet hit negative free cash flow for the first time ever since going public.

Translation: even Google ... a company that basically has a license to print money (aka Google Search) ... is losing a ton of money on AI.