Announcing its third-quarter 2026 financial results on October 28, Alphabet reported consolidated revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25% year over year. This growth stemmed from both sides: search continued to expand, and cloud infrastructure grew at a much faster pace.
Specifically, revenue from Google Search and related services rose 12%. Google Cloud reached $30.7 billion, an increase of 103% compared to the same period last year. Alphabet also stated that it surpassed 150 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, a figure that includes trial users.
Leadership says AI is driving search queries
CEO Sundar Pichai stated that investments in AI are driving overall query growth, including commercial queries. According to him, year-over-year query growth is currently at its highest level in the past 5 years.
This is management commentary in the earnings release, not an independently measured figure. Google did not disclose absolute query counts or specific growth rates, making it impossible to verify the “highest in 5 years” claim against external data.
What can be verified is that search advertising revenue continues to grow at a double-digit rate even as AI products like AI Mode and AI overviews appear more frequently in search results. If these features were reducing clicks on sponsored links, revenue would have stalled.
Infrastructure is the most expensive part of the story
Growth in the cloud division comes with heavy infrastructure costs. Google is expanding data centers across several markets, including a project bulldozing 300 hectares of forest in Finland that is under investigation by the country’s oversight agency for failing to complete an environmental impact assessment.
The past quarter was also a period of intensive AI rollouts for Google: releasing Gemini 4 Argon, surpassing 1 billion monthly users on Gemini, introducing the Pixel 11 lineup, and reshuffling senior leadership in AI. On October 28, the company further announced Gemini 4 Carbon, a model focused on cybersecurity defense.
Infrastructure spending is not an issue unique to Google. Meta recently announced a plan to raise $95 billion for AI infrastructure, indicating that the race to scale computing capacity remains in a phase where spending outpaces revenue.
How should these figures be interpreted?
The 25% revenue growth is a measured result, not a projection. However, attributing most of that gain to AI represents the company’s interpretation, as the earnings report does not break down revenue from AI products separately from legacy operations.
A cautious reading: search remains the primary revenue driver and continues to expand, while cloud is growing rapidly but from a much smaller baseline. The unanswered question remains the cloud division’s profit margins as infrastructure expenditures continue to rise.
Key factors to watch in the coming quarter are whether Cloud growth can sustain its triple-digit momentum, and whether Google will disclose more detailed figures on AI-specific capital expenditures or maintain its current bundled reporting format.