Alphabet IncGOOGWATCHFeb 05, 2025Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Jul 10, 2026. Market Open.
Fears that AI would eat its lunch. Harder for Anthropic to monetize a new tool than for GOOG to take AI and apply it to a business model that it already monetizes. Muscle memory of the populace gravitates to GOOG to find information. Probably thrives in the new AI world, until something more disruptive comes along.
AI monetization is happening, and AI Mode has been a game changer. Stronger cloud growth (revenue grew 63% YOY last quarter, tremendous), broader monetization across platforms. Search and advertising remain strong, lots of cashflow. Also a great ecosystem.
Good growth, but relatively decent valuation. Yield is 0.25%.
A year ago, consensus was that Search was going to die. Seems ridiculous now. Gemini is overtaking ChatGPT. Data centre business is growing faster than before. Still not that expensive. He hasn't sold any shares yet, but may take some off the table from the long-term holding and put toward one of the Mag 7 laggards.
Shares dropped 7.29% on reporting. It got punished for announcing spending of $75 billion in capex this year--punished for investing heavily in growth, which is a big change from last year. It ran up 25% since last September till the report, making it the third-best performer in the Mag 7. The quarter was mixed: slightly weaker revenue and surprisingly weaker Cloud revenue, but EPS and YouTube revenue beat. Growth slowed, but core advertising is still doing great. And yet Microsoft is spending $80 billion in capex, and Meta $65 billion. What has changed is the arrival of DeepSeek, which has changed the narrative around AI spending: Do megatech companies still need to spend a lot on AI infrastructure? Is the reaction to GOOG an exception or the new norm?