Internet Google parent company Alphabet plans huge AI investments
In the race of AI developers, Google's parent company Alphabet is drastically increasing its investments. The internet giant has announced capital investments of between 175 and 185 billion dollars for the current year.
05.02.2026, 01:22
05.02.2026, 02:07
SDA
The money is likely to flow into data centers for artificial intelligence, among other things. Alphabet invested a good 91 billion dollars last year.
Google competes in the AI field with the ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and the Facebook group Meta, among others. Google has its AI software Gemini competing against ChatGPT and the like. The Gemini app alone recently reached 750 million users per month, but the technology is also used in Google's search engine.
Most recently, Apple also opted for the AI models behind Gemini as the basis for a more useful version of its voice assistant Siri. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a conference call with analysts that Apple had chosen the company as its preferred cloud provider.
What keeps the Google boss awake at night
Google is also eclipsing Meta with its spending plans. The Facebook group recently forecast capital investments of between 115 and 135 billion dollars for this year.
At the same time, Google bosses are worried that they might not be fast enough even with this huge expenditure. One of the analysts asked what was keeping the company bosses awake at night. It is "definitely computer capacity" with all kinds of bottlenecks, such as energy, available space and components, said Pichai. For example, the demand for memory chips for AI data centers is currently devouring a large proportion of global production capacity. As a result, prices are rising.
Google's investment forecast is causing share price gains for chip providers, who are likely to end up with a large proportion of the expenditure. Shares in Nvidia, the leader in AI semiconductors, rose by almost two percent at times in after-hours trading, while chip provider Broadcom rose by more than six percent.
Google's advertising business remains strong in the AI era
Google's advertising business, which is running at full speed, continues to provide the money for the rapid expansion. It grew by around 13.5% year-on-year to 82.3 billion dollars in the final quarter of 2025. Overall, Group revenue increased by 18 percent to 113.8 billion dollars. On the bottom line, Alphabet posted a consolidated profit of almost 34.5 billion dollars - almost 30 percent more than a year earlier.
The development of Google's advertising business is being monitored very closely. This is because Google is adding more AI-generated summaries to its search engine that can answer users' queries directly - even if they are sometimes incorrect or inaccurate, which many users do not notice due to a lack of verification. This reduces the incentive to click on links to original sources next to the search results. This is how Google has traditionally made the most money.
Pichai now said that AI answers in search results increased usage. In AI mode, many people asked more questions in the search engine. Once people started accessing AI search results, they used the function more.
