Google delivered first-quarter results that far exceeded Wall Street expectations, with revenue climbing 22 percent and net income soaring 81 percent as AI demand transformed its cloud computing division into a major growth engine.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google parent company Alphabet posted approximately $110 billion in sales for the first quarter, surpassing analyst projections and demonstrating how the company’s substantial investments in artificial intelligence are beginning to generate significant returns. Net income reached $62.6 billion, representing an 81 percent increase compared with the same period a year earlier.
The company’s cloud division emerged as the standout performer, with revenue jumping 63 percent to $20 billion from the year-ago quarter. This dramatic expansion reflects surging enterprise demand for AI solutions and the computing infrastructure required to power them. Perhaps most strikingly, Google’s cloud backlog nearly doubled to $460 billion, up from $240 billion in the prior quarter, with the company anticipating that roughly half of this amount will convert to revenue within the next two years.
CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized AI’s transformative impact across the organization, stating that AI is “lighting up every part of the business.”
The robust performance comes as Google continues to pour enormous resources into advancing its AI capabilities and building the data centers necessary to support them. The company raised its capital expenditure guidance for 2026 to a range of $180 billion to $190 billion, an increase from its previous estimate of $175 billion to $185 billion. CFO Anat Ashkenazi reinforced this commitment during Wednesday’s earnings call with investors and analysts, saying, “These strong results reinforce our conviction to invest the capital required to continue to capture the AI opportunity.” She added, “We expect our 2027 capex to significantly increase compared to 2026.”
Google’s position in the competitive AI landscape received a significant boost with the November launch of Gemini 3, the most advanced version of its AI model and chatbot. The system achieved superior performance on benchmark tests across multiple intelligence categories. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT maintains its lead in user adoption with over 900 million weekly active users, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that OpenAI missed its annual revenue target last year, partly because Gemini captured market share from its rival.
Despite Google’s massive business wins in AI, questions about the bias baked into its technology remain. Breitbart’s Wynton Hall, author of the instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, revealed in March that Google’s Gemini AI brands seven prominent Republican legislators, as well as Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as “hate speech” violators:
Gemini generated a comprehensive report, first covered by Fox News, totaling over 3,400 words in length titled: “Analytical Assessment of Congressional Rhetoric: Evaluating U.S. Senatorial Discourse against Algorithmic Hate Speech Safety Standards.” Despite Google receiving billions of dollars in federal multi-year contracts, and despite President Donald Trump’s 2025 AI Action Plan stating that “AI systems must be free from ideological bias” in order to receive lucrative federal procurement contracts, Gemini AI declared that the following seven Republican Senators, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are guilty of violating Gemini’s “hate speech policies.”
Read more at the Wall Street Journal here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.