The Google and Alphabet headquarters in California.Image: keystone
In the race between AI developers, Google parent Alphabet is drastically increasing investments. For the current year, the Internet giant announced capital investments of between 175 and 185 billion dollars.
02/05/2026, 04:0702/05/2026, 04:07
The money is likely to flow into data centers for artificial intelligence, among other things. Last year, Alphabet invested a good $91 billion.
Google competes in the AI field with, among others, the ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and the Facebook group Meta. Google is using its AI software Gemini to compete against ChatGPT and Co. The Gemini app alone recently had 750 million users per month, but the technology is also used in Google’s search engine.
Most recently, Apple also decided to use the AI models behind Gemini as the basis for a more useful version of its voice assistant Siri. Google and Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai said in a conference call with analysts that Apple had chosen the group as its preferred cloud provider.
What keeps the Google boss awake at night
With its output plans, Google is also outshining Meta. The Facebook Group recently forecast capital investments of between $115 and $135 billion this year.
At the same time, Google executives are worried that even with these huge expenses they might not be fast enough. One of the analysts asked what keeps the company bosses up at night. It is “definitely computer capacity” with all sorts of bottlenecks in terms of energy, available space and components, said Pichai. The demand for memory chips for AI data centers is currently consuming a large portion of global production capacity. As a result, prices rise.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai.Image: keystone
Google’s investment forecast ensures price gains for chip providers, where a large part of the expenditure is likely to end up. Shares in the Nvidia Group, the leader in AI semiconductors, temporarily rose by almost two percent in after-hours trading, while chip provider Broadcom rose by more than six percent.
Google’s advertising business remains strong in the AI era
The money for the rapid expansion continues to be provided primarily by Google’s advertising business, which is in full swing. It grew by around 13.5 percent year-on-year to $82.3 billion in the final quarter of 2025. Overall, group revenues increased by 18 percent to $113.8 billion. The bottom line is that Alphabet posted a consolidated profit of almost $34.5 billion – almost 30 percent more than a year earlier.
The development of Google’s advertising business is being watched very closely. Because Google is introducing more summaries created with the help of AI into the search engine, which can answer user queries directly – even if they are sometimes incorrect or inaccurate, which many users do not notice due to a lack of verification. This reduces the incentive to click on links to original sources next to the search results. This is how Google traditionally made most of its money.
Pichai now said AI answers in search results increased usage. In AI mode, many people asked more questions in the search engine. Once people started accessing AI search results, they began using the feature more. (sda/dpa)