‎Google Loses $500bn in Market Value after Profit Disappoints Wall Street

‎Shares in the Google parent Alphabet fell double digits Wednesday evening into Thursday trading, erasing hundreds of billions of dollars in stock market value from the $4tn tech giant.
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‎The company had reported lower-than-expected profit and a slowdown in its advertising business while it maintained big spending on AI.
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‎Net profit slid 25% from a year earlier to $26.2bn in the July-to-September period, or $2.12 a share, well short of expectations by analysts surveyed by FactSet.
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‎Alphabet booked an $8.7bn loss on its equity investments, which it attributed to its stake in SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led company where shares have struggled since going public in June.
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‎Revenue, however, rose 25% to an enormous $127.6bn. The figure was slightly below the roughly $128bn analysts had forecast.
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‎Advertising revenue grew 11% to $82bn, short of expectations. Revenue from Google’s search business, still the company’s largest source of income, rose 12% to $63.4bn, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter.
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‎YouTube, now the most-watched content provider on American TV screens, saw advertising revenue grow 9% to $11.2bn, down from 13% growth in the previous quarter. YouTube Music and Premium passed 150 million subscribers worldwide, including trials.
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‎Google Cloud, which rents computing power and AI tools to businesses, saw revenue jump 103% to $30.7bn, ahead of analyst expectations.
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‎The company said sales of its in-house AI chips, known as TPUs, contributed significantly to that growth. Operating income for the unit tripled to $11.1bn.
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‎Google is also selling its TPU chips to outside companies, in a growing challenge to market leader Nvidia. OpenAI reportedly plans to buy some of the chips.
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‎Alphabet’s “Other Bets” division, which includes the robotaxi company Waymo, posted revenue of $372m and an operating loss of $2bn.
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‎Waymo now provides more than 500,000 paid rides a week across 15 US metropolitan areas and aims to reach 1m weekly rides by the end of the year.
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‎Alphabet spent $51.4bn on capital expenditures during the quarter, mostly on datacenters and AI chips, more than double the $24bn a year earlier.
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‎Its latest forecast for capex spending is between $195bn to $205bn in spending for 2026.
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‎The company said it would continue to increase capex spending significantly in 2027.
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‎https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/28/google-alphabet-q3-earnings-report