Live: Will Alphabet Beat Q1 Earnings After the Bell?

Alphabet (GOOGL)(GOOG) is seeing strong gains after hours. The company’s stock is up 6.6% after the company delivered blowout cloud and search growth. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai went into detail on the company’s Gemini Enterprise business and its growing at a red-hot 40% quarter-over-quarter.

Here’s what he had to say:

“Now over to Google Cloud. Google Cloud is differentiated because we are the only provider to offer first-party solutions across the entire enterprise AI stack. Our growth in revenue, operating margin and backlog highlights this differentiation. Our enterprise AI solutions have become our primary growth driver for cloud for the first time. In Q1, revenue from products built on our GenAI models grew nearly 800% year-over-year.

We are winning new customers faster with new customer acquisition doubling compared to the same period last year. We are seeing strong deal momentum, doubling the number of $100 million to $1 billion deals year-on-year and signing multiple billion dollar plus deals. And we are deepening relationships with existing customers outpaced their initial commitments by 45% accelerating over last quarter. At Cloud Next last week, we introduced hundreds of new capabilities across our vertically optimized AI stack that are designed to work together for our enterprise customers.

We introduced a new Gemini enterprise agent platform that empowers users to build, orchestrate, govern and optimize agents with the controls that enterprise customers need. Along with new capabilities in Gemini enterprise app, like projects, canvas, long-running agents and skills, every employee can build agents.

In Q1, Gemini Enterprise paid monthly active users grew 40% quarter-over-quarter. That includes major global brands like Bosch, Cityweft, Merck and Mars Inc. Our partner ecosystem plays an increasingly critical role in driving Gemini enterprise adoption. We saw 9x year-over-year growth both in seats sold with partners and in the number of partners adopting it for internal use. This momentum is leading to accelerating usage of our models.

Over the past 12 months, 330 Google Cloud customers each processed over 1 trillion tokens. 35 reached the 10 trillion token milestone. To give agents business context from enterprise data to help them reason intelligently, we introduced a new agentic data cloud. It includes across cloud Lake house, knowledge catalog and deep research agents, which combine research and analytical skills. As an example, using our Data Cloud, American Express is enabling agentic e-commerce at scale by moving an enterprise data platform along with hundreds of production applications to BigQuery.

Vodafone is proactively resolving outages, automating network planning and precisely targeting capacity. Enterprise data has become critical for agents to reason. Our strength with BigQuery and Gemini Enterprise has led Gemini-powered workflows in BigQuery to grow over 30x year-over-year.

As cybersecurity threats from the use of AI models accelerate, our expertise in AI and cybersecurity is driving strong demand for our agentic defense offerings. In March, we closed the acquisition of Wiz, a leading cloud and security AI platform, which is an incredible fit for the moment we are in. We have seen tremendous interest from customers in our unique cybersecurity and AI products and services to protect their IT estate.

The performance of Wiz so far has exceeded our expectations. Together with Google’s Threat Intelligence, security operations and AI models, the business helping organizations [ deduct ], prevent and respond to threats. We introduced new Gemini-powered agents for threat detection, continuous red teaming and automated remediation to protect software code and cloud systems. Customers like Deloitte, Priceline and Shell are using our agentic defense to strengthen their security posture. All of this is powered by the AI infrastructure I mentioned earlier.

Our TPUs continue our leadership in performance, cost and power efficiency for customers like Thinking Machines Lab, Hudson River Trading and Boston Dynamics. As TPU demand grows from AI labs, capital markets firms and high-performance computing applications will begin to deliver TPUs to a select group of customers in their own data centers in the hardware configuration to expand our addressable market opportunity.”

Overall Grade: A. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) delivered a blowout Q1 with a 94.1% EPS beat and 63% Cloud growth, offset by free cash flow pressure and absent formal guidance.

The operating story is exceptional: every reportable line accelerated, margins expanded despite doubled capex, and the Cloud backlog signals durable demand. Free cash flow compression and absent Q2 guidance are manageable given the $45.790 billion in operating cash flow. Keep an eye on capacity commentary from the 4:30 PM ET call.

Alphabet did not issue formal Q2 revenue guidance in the press release, which is consistent with their standard practice. The commentary will come on the conference call.

What we do know is this. Google Cloud entering Q2 with a backlog that nearly doubled quarter over quarter to over $460 billion is the most powerful forward indicator in the entire release. That backlog does not lie. Management is going to be asked repeatedly tonight about capacity constraints and whether the $175 to $185 billion capex plan is enough to meet the demand they are seeing.

The 5% dividend increase to $0.22 per quarter is a small but notable gesture of confidence. Alphabet issued $31.1 billion in senior unsecured notes during the quarter for general corporate purposes, which is worth watching as it suggests the company is actively managing its capital structure ahead of a massive infrastructure build.

The conference call at 4:30 p.m. ET is where the real guidance story gets told tonight.

Google Cloud grew 63% to $20.03 billion. That is the number of the night across all four companies reporting. Last quarter Cloud grew 48%. The acceleration is dramatic and the backlog nearly doubling quarter over quarter to over $460 billion means this momentum has legs.

Google Search revenue grew 19% to $60.4 billion. That is the business everyone has been worried about as AI potentially disrupts the search model. Tonight Search showed no signs of slowing down and Pichai noted queries are at an all time high.

YouTube ads grew 11% to $9.88 billion, snapping back from last quarter’s disappointing 9% growth. The lapping of the 2024 U.S. election spending that hurt last quarter is now behind them.

Operating margin expanded two percentage points to 36.1% despite the massive capex ramp. That is the number that will quiet the critics who argued Google could not grow revenue and expand margins simultaneously while spending $175 to $185 billion on infrastructure this year.

Paid subscriptions reached 350 million across consumer services. Gemini Enterprise posted 40% quarter over quarter growth in paid monthly active users. The consumer AI monetization story is starting to show up in real numbers.

Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) just reported Q1 2026 results and shares are up 4% after hours. Here’s what the company delivered:

Revenue: $109.9 billion
EPS: $5.11
Here’s what Wall Street was expecting:
Revenue: $107 billion
EPS: $2.63

This is a blowout quarter. Revenue beat by nearly $3 billion and EPS nearly doubled Wall Street’s estimate, though it is worth noting that a $36.9 billion unrealized gain on equity securities inflated the bottom line significantly. The operating story underneath that noise is still outstanding.

The headline number is Google Cloud, which grew 63% to $20 billion. That absolutely demolished the 48% growth rate from last quarter and is well ahead of what anyone expected. Search grew 19% and YouTube ads grew 11%, snapping back from last quarter’s 9% growth rate.

Prediction markets are pricing near-certainty that Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) clears tonight’s bar. On Polymarket, the “Will Alphabet beat quarterly earnings?” contract sits at 98.4% Yes, backed by $21,003 in volume and 15,811 in open interest. That conviction tracks Alphabet’s four straight beats in fiscal 2025, including a 39.75% surprise in Q1 25.

Direction traders lean bullish too: GOOGL is priced 69.5% to finish today up. On price levels, the crowd assigns 89% odds of closing the week above $330, 79.5% above $340, but only 48% above $350.

Worth noting: this same crowd has resolved 67.9% of GOOGL markets correctly across 28 contests, with an average accuracy score of 0.915. Translation: a beat is expected, a modest pop is plausible, and a $350 handle is a coin flip.

Alphabet (GOOGL) is expected to report right after the bell tonight. Here are the key figures to watch:

Q1 Wall Street Consensus

• Revenue: $107 billion
• EPS: $2.63

Q2 Expectations (The company will issue an ‘outlook’ but likely won’t provide specific guidance figures)

• Revenue: $113.8 billion
• EPS: $2.78

Here are the key growth figures Alphabet provided last quarter:

• Search Growth: 17%
• Google Cloud Growth: 48%
• YouTube Growth: 9%

That YouTube growth rate was a little disappointing, but 48% growth from Google Cloud and 17% growth from Search more than made up for it. Key in on these three growth rates once Alphabet reports tonight.