Race for the AI crown Up to 185 billion dollars: Google plans huge investments

Google wants to surpass ChatGPT and co with its AI software Gemini. The parent company Alphabet is planning extraordinary investments to create the infrastructure for this.

DPA

04.02.2026, 23:36

04.02.2026, 23:51

dpa

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. The money is likely to flow into data centers for artificial intelligence, among other things. Alphabet already invested just over 90 billion dollars last year. Google competes in AI with the ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and the Facebook group Meta, among others.

Google has its AI software Gemini competing against ChatGPT and others. Most recently, Apple also opted for the AI models behind it as the basis for a more useful version of its voice assistant Siri.

Google is also eclipsing Meta with its output plans: The Facebook group recently forecast capital investments of between 115 and 135 billion dollars for this year.

Google's advertising business remains strong

The money for the rapid expansion continues to come primarily from Google's advertising business, which is running at full speed. It grew by around 13.5 percent 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. This could reduce the incentive to click on links next to the search results. This is how Google has traditionally made its money.