Alphabet stock rose more than 3% on Wednesday after the company reported first-quarter results that beat Wall Street estimates on both the top and bottom lines, sending the goog stock price higher in early trading. Alphabet earned $5.11 a share on revenue of $109.9 billion, topping expectations for $2.62 a share on $107.1 billion in sales.
The results marked a sharp jump from the same period last year, when Alphabet reported earnings per share of $2.81 on revenue of $90.23 billion. The stock has climbed roughly 30% over the past six months as investors have continued to reward the company’s growth in search, cloud and artificial intelligence.
The biggest lift came from Google Cloud, which posted revenue of $20.03 billion, well above the $18.4 billion analysts had expected. Google advertising revenue also came in stronger than forecast at $77.2 billion, while YouTube advertising revenue reached $9.88 billion. Alphabet said Gemini Enterprise grew paid monthly active users 40% quarter over quarter and said its first-party models are now processing more than 16 billion tokens per minute, a 60% increase from the prior quarter.
Those figures reinforced the role Alphabet’s cloud and AI products played in the quarter. The company also said Google Cloud backlog nearly doubled to more than $460 billion, a sign of demand that extends beyond the current period. At the same time, the business is pushing deeper into competition with Nvidia and AMD through its chip strategy.
That strategy has moved quickly. Last week, Alphabet announced two new AI chips, the TPU 8t and TPU 8i, at its Google Cloud Next 2026 conference. Earlier this month, it entered into an agreement with Anthropic and Broadcom to provide multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity, with the first raft of processors expected to come online next year.
Brian Nowak said he hopes to get more color from Alphabet’s leadership about its TPU strategy moving forward. He also said he does not believe the business is priced into the stock and that it could be a significant driver for the company in 2027. For now, the market’s answer is clear: Alphabet’s earnings beat was strong enough to move the goog stock price, but the bigger test may be whether its AI hardware push can keep that rally going.