Artificial intelligence is injecting strong growth momentum into Google's advertising and cloud computing businesses. In order to win the artificial intelligence competition, Google has also increased related investment to unprecedented levels. Alphabet announced that its fourth-quarter revenue increased by 18% year-on-year and disclosed plans to nearly double its investment in data centers and other capital projects. As of press time, Alphabet's stock price fell 1.96%.

Driven by the growth of digital advertising and cloud computing businesses, Google's fourth-quarter sales reached nearly US$114 billion, exceeding analysts' expectations; net profit was US$34.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30%.

In 2025, Google's annual sales hit a record high of US$403 billion, breaking the US$400 billion mark for the first time; its annual profit reached approximately US$132 billion.

Google, like other tech companies, is spending tens of billions of dollars developing artificial intelligence models and building the data centers needed to train and run them. Nowadays, technology companies face many restrictions when finding or building power supply facilities for data centers, making data center construction work increasingly difficult.

Google raised its 2026 capital expenditure forecast to $175 billion to $185 billion, compared with only $91 billion to $93 billion in 2025.

Alphabet's stock price fluctuated between a 6% drop and a 2% rise after hours after executives communicated with investors.

Google CEO said, "The core issue currently revolves around computing power. How to quickly expand the scale of computing power to meet the current ultra-high demand, how to rationally deploy long-term investments, and how to improve efficiency in the process are issues we urgently need to solve."

Driven by the race to develop artificial intelligence, Google's cloud business, which provides computing power services for data centers, has experienced significant growth, with revenue of nearly $18 billion in the fourth quarter, a 48% increase from the same period in 2024.

Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Apple announced quarterly results last week, and Amazon will release its earnings report on Thursday.

In November 2025, Google launched its most powerful artificial intelligence model and chat robot, Gemini 3, to achieve overtake in the artificial intelligence competition. Google said that the number of monthly active users of the Gemini app has now increased to 750 million from 650 million in October last year.

Alphabet's stock price has risen by 65% ​​in 2025, and last month it joined the US$4 trillion market capitalization club with Nvidia.

Google is continuing to integrate artificial intelligence tools into many of its products, including its classic search engine. In 2025, Google launched an “artificial intelligence mode” that searches and answers in a chatbot-like interactive form, with fewer links displayed.

Although Google's search business faces competition from artificial intelligence startups such as ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Perplexity, its search business revenue in the fourth quarter still reached approximately US$63 billion.

In September 2025, in a federal lawsuit against Google’s search monopoly, Google successfully escaped severe antitrust penalties. A U.S. district judge ruled that Google cannot pay to be the exclusive search engine across devices and browsers, but rejected the U.S. government's request for a more punitive penalty.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a related lawsuit against Google in 2020. At that time, it proposed to force Google to divest its Chrome browser and require it to make other rectifications. The judge said such enforcement measures were unnecessary, in part because competition in the field of artificial intelligence had made the search engine market more competitive.

Wall Street analysts and investors alike viewed the ruling as a victory for both Google and Apple, as Google continues to maintain a cooperative arrangement that pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to become the default search engine in Apple's Safari browser.

Google’s monopoly in the digital advertising market is also facing antitrust investigations. The U.S. Department of Justice and Google entered the trial stage of related lawsuits last year, and the U.S. District Judge will consider various remedial measures to enhance competition in the online advertising market. Brinkema ruled last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on online auction technology that determines how ads appear on websites.