Alphabet’s Q1 profit beats expectations, with Google’s big AI bets paying off

Google’s transition into the era of artificial intelligence continued to pay off for its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., which on Wednesday announced another quarter of stellar growth that helped to more than double its already lofty market value during the past year.

Alphabet earned $62.6 billion, or $5.11 per share, during the January-March period, an 81% increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 22% from last year to $109.9 billion. Both numbers easily surpassed the analyst projections that steer investors.

Alphabet’s stock price rose more than 6% in extended trading after the numbers came out, setting up the shares to hit a new high during Thursday’s regular session. The company’s market value currently stands at $4.2 trillion, up from $1.9 trillion just a year ago.

The performance in the past quarter prompted Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to celebrate the huge bets that the company has been placing on AI technology during the past three years. Those investments, Pichai said, “are lighting up every part of the business.”

As usual, digital ads fueled by Google’s dominant search engine propelled the growth as revenue from those operations shot up 16% from last year’s first quarter. It marked the fourth straight quarter that Google’s ad sales increased by more than 10% from the previous year.

Google’s fastest-growing division remains its Cloud division, which has been riding the AI boom to sell more products and services to corporate customers and government agencies such as the deal that it just struck with the U.S. military. Google Cloud’s revenue surged 63% from last year, to $20 billion.

That growth is a sign that Alphabet’s spending spree on AI is producing dividends so far, although investors continue to worry that the Mountain View, California, company and its Big Tech peers are pouring too much money into a still-nascent and unproven technology.

Alphabet, though, is betting that it’s better to overspend on AI than be too stingy and risk being left behind.

In a previous quarterly update released in February, Alphabet disclosed that it’s earmarking $175 billion to $185 billion for capital expenditures this year that will largely be devoted to building AI data centers and other tools tied to the technology. That’s on top of $91 billion in capital expenditures last year.

“It’s really exciting to see how our AI investments are delivering value,” Pichai said Wednesday.

—By Michael Liedtke, AP technology writer

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