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Alphabet opened 2026 with a higher-than-expected quarter, reporting $109.9B in revenue as Google Cloud, Search, YouTube, Google One, and paid AI plans all added to the result. The parent company of Google said paid subscriptions reached 350M, up by 25M from the end of 2025.
Good to Know
Alphabet gave investors a clear earnings beat, but the subscription number may draw just as much attention. Google added 25M paid subscriptions in one quarter, helped mainly by YouTube and Google One, the cloud storage plan that now also bundles access to advanced Gemini tools.
Gemini remains harder to read. Alphabet did not give a new public total for Gemini subscribers or monthly active users. However, CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini Enterprise paid monthly active users grew 40% from the prior quarter. He also said the latest quarter was the best one yet for consumer AI plans, mainly due to Gemini app adoption.
YouTube gave Alphabet a mixed result. Ad revenue rose 11% year over year to $9.88B, but analysts had expected $9.99B. That miss fits with a wider change inside YouTube, where more users pay for ad-free viewing through YouTube Premium. Pichai had already told analysts to judge YouTube through both ads and subscriptions, not ads alone.
Google Cloud gave the quarter more force. Revenue from the unit reached $20B, up 63% year over year, as enterprise AI demand lifted cloud sales. Reuters also reported that Alphabet shares rose more than 6% after the results, helped by cloud growth and the full earnings beat.
Search also stayed strong. Alphabet said Search revenue grew 19%, with AI features helping usage and query volume. That gives Google more room to fund Gemini, cloud infrastructure, and paid AI plans while still leaning on the ad business that built the company.
The spending side still deserves attention. Reuters reported that Alphabet spent more than $35B on capital expenditures in Q1 and may spend up to $190B for the year as it builds more AI capacity. So, yes, Alphabet beat expectations. But investors now have to track two stories at once: fast AI monetization and very high AI infrastructure costs.