Google and Alphabet closed the second quarter of 2026 with numbers that grab attention even from people who don’t follow the financial markets closely.
Alphabet’s revenue grew 24% compared to the same period last year, and CEO Sundar Pichai got straight to the point during the earnings call on July 22, 2026: artificial intelligence is no longer just a promise on the horizon — it’s already redefining what’s possible across every part of the business. 🚀
From Gemini running in nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies to Google Cloud breaking records with 82% growth, the quarter showed that the heavy bet on AI is translating into real results — and fast.
But the financial numbers are only part of the story. Behind them, there’s intense activity across products, language models, infrastructure, and even long-term bets like autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and drug discovery.
In the sections below, we break down everything that happened this quarter and what it signals about the next chapters for Alphabet and Google. 👇
The Numbers That Tell the Story
When we talk about 24% revenue growth, that’s not just some random number thrown on a spreadsheet. For a company the size of Alphabet, one that already moves hundreds of billions of dollars a year, that kind of jump represents something structural happening under the surface. It’s not a lucky quarter, it’s not a seasonal effect, and it’s no coincidence that this growth comes at the exact same time artificial intelligence stopped being an internal lab project and became a real, sellable, scalable product.
Google Cloud was arguably the most surprising highlight of the quarter. An 82% growth rate doesn’t happen in mature companies unless there’s real and urgent demand driving it. According to Pichai, this result was fueled by strong demand for AI infrastructure and solutions, with the Cloud backlog reaching a staggering $514 billion. That number shows the scale of future commitments customers have already made with the platform, giving a clear sense of how far from temporary the demand for AI really is.
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Beyond Cloud, the search division also posted meaningful growth. Search and Other revenue climbed 17%, while YouTube ads grew 13%. This goes against a narrative that had been spreading a few quarters ago suggesting AI could cannibalize the company’s advertising model. What the numbers actually show is the opposite: AI-powered search experiences are generating more queries, more engagement, and ultimately more value for advertisers across the Google ecosystem.
Advances in AI Models
The quarter was packed with launches on the model front. Google announced the new Gemini 3.6 Flash and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, which combine affordability with high efficiency. According to Pichai, the Flash series has become the company’s workhorse precisely because it hits that sweet spot between performance and price that developers have been looking for.
A special highlight goes to Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, a model designed for security. Paired with the CodeMender agent, it finds and fixes software vulnerabilities with top-tier performance, comparable to much larger cybersecurity models. Gemini 3.5 Pro is already in testing, and the team kicked off the most ambitious training run in the company’s history: pre-training for Gemini 4. 🤖
The adoption numbers are impressive. More than 9 million developers build with Google’s models every month, and the APIs now process around 22 billion tokens per minute — a massive leap compared to the 16 billion from the previous quarter. The company is even still dealing with supply constraints to keep up with all the demand, which is honestly a pretty great problem to have.
Another new arrival was Omni, which lets users create anything from any input, starting with video. Since its launch at Google I/O in May, there’s been a 40% increase in daily active users creating videos on the Gemini app. Meanwhile, the open-source Gemma model family, lightweight enough to run on local devices, surpassed 900 million downloads, with over 300 million coming from Gemma 4 alone since April.
The Antigravity Platform
The agentic development platform Antigravity already has over 2.4 million weekly active users. And it’s not just in the hands of external customers — internally, the tool has accelerated the way Google itself builds products. One example Pichai mentioned was a Chrome team that’s on track to speed up delivery by eight times, compressing a two-year roadmap into just three months thanks to model-driven refactoring.
Search and the Gemini App: AI Reaching Billions of People
In search, AI continues to drive a period of expansion. A self-declared soccer fan, Pichai celebrated the fact that Search usage hit an all-time high during this year’s World Cup, showing how people turn to Google in the moments that truly matter. The company unified AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single search experience, combining the most advanced AI capabilities with the best of the web.
Since the global expansion of AI Mode last October, the feature has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, driving an incremental increase in search volume and sending billions of clicks to websites every week. And there’s an important technical detail: even while delivering more advanced capabilities, Google managed to bring the cost of AI Mode responses down to the lowest level since launch, thanks to engineering and hardware optimizations.
The Gemini app reached 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling over the past year. Features like Daily Brief and the personalized Gemini Spark agent, now available in the United States and internationally, have really resonated with users.
YouTube and the Power of Major Events
On YouTube, the pattern seems clear: when something big happens in the world, the world turns to the platform. During the FIFA World Cup 2026, more than 1.7 billion unique viewers watched tournament-related videos. And conversational AI is now integrated into the experience with Ask YouTube, which uses Gemini models to let users ask complex questions about videos, get quick summaries, and jump directly to specific moments. In June 2026 alone, more than 140 million users interacted with the feature on the watch page. 📺
Google Cloud: Consolidated Leadership
Cloud growth is powered by an integrated AI portfolio that brings together chips, models, data, security, and agent platforms — all designed to work as a cohesive system. The company is winning on three fronts: acquiring new customers at more than double the rate compared to the prior year, deepening relationships with existing customers who are exceeding their commitments by over 50%, and growing with partners, with Marketplace transactions multiplying by more than seven times.
Gemini Enterprise is one of the strongest engines behind this growth, with the Agent Development Kit reaching nearly 70 million total downloads. Among the customers cited are giants like PepsiCo, Intel, HSBC, Bell Canada, Macy’s, and SIGNAL IDUNA. And paid token usage has skyrocketed: nearly 500 Cloud customers individually processed more than 1 trillion tokens over the past year.
Security with AI at the Core
The AI-powered security platform has also been gaining momentum. Today, 90% of the Fortune 100 uses Google Cloud Security, nearly 90% of Wiz customers leverage AI security features, and there’s been a more than 45% increase in AI workloads scanned and protected. Organizations like Morgan Stanley, Texas Children’s, and Atlassian are among those trusting these tools to protect critical infrastructure.
Infrastructure and Long-Term Bets
Behind everything showing up in the financial results, there’s an infrastructure layer that Alphabet has been building at an accelerated pace. The company offers the broadest range of accelerators in the industry, including the new NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform and the TPU 8t and 8i. Add to that unique offerings like the Virgo Network, capable of connecting one million AI accelerators across multiple data centers as a unified supercomputer, and the new Axion CPU, delivering 30% more performance per dollar compared to competitors.
At the same time, Alphabet continues betting on long-term plays. Waymo, its autonomous vehicle division, unveiled its newest vehicle, the Ojai, the first powered by the sixth generation of the Waymo Driver. Wing completed more than 1 million home deliveries, expanding partnerships with Walmart, DoorDash, and Papa Johns. And in healthcare, Isomorphic Labs raised over $2 billion to supercharge its AI-powered drug design engine.
What This Quarter Signals for the Future
When Sundar Pichai says that artificial intelligence is redefining what’s possible, he’s signaling an important phase shift. Until recently, big tech companies had to convince the market that AI would be transformative. Now, the job is to show that the transformation has already begun — and Alphabet’s numbers this quarter serve exactly as that proof.
For companies still deciding whether to jump on the artificial intelligence wave, the data works as a market barometer. If nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 is already using Gemini, that says a lot about where companies that want to stay competitive are placing their chips. It’s no longer about experimenting with technology out of curiosity — it’s about not falling behind at a time when competitors are already reaping real gains in productivity and innovation.
And for those following the sector closely, Google’s moves reinforce a trend that will define the coming years: AI is no longer a separate vertical within tech companies. It’s becoming the foundational layer on which all other products and services are built. And whoever masters that layer with more accurate models, more robust infrastructure, and broader distribution will have a competitive edge that’s hard to erase. As Pichai himself summed it up, it was an extraordinary first half of 2026, with much more to come. 📊
