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Alphabet has opened 2026 with the kind of quarter that makes the rest of the tech industry stop and look twice. The company posted revenue of €96.71 billion for the first three months of the year, a sharp jump from €79.38 billion in the same period last year, as AI demand, cloud momentum, and core search performance all moved in the same direction.
That topline growth came with serious profit expansion. Operating income reached €34.94 billion, while net income climbed to €55.08 billion, far above the €30.40 billion recorded a year earlier. Even against the previous quarter, when Alphabet delivered €100.15 billion in revenue, this latest report stands out for the breadth of its gains rather than one isolated bright spot.
Sundar Pichai made the company’s message unmistakable: Alphabet’s AI strategy is no longer a future-facing story. It is already shaping the business at scale. According to the CEO, AI-powered search experiences helped push query volumes to a record high, while search revenue rose 19% year over year. That matters. Search remains the engine room of Google’s business, and any sign that AI features are increasing usage instead of disrupting it will be closely watched across the market.
The same pattern is playing out in cloud. Google Cloud generated €17.82 billion in Q1, up from €10.91 billion a year earlier, a striking leap that underlines how aggressively enterprises are spending on infrastructure tied to AI workloads. Alphabet also said its cloud backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter to more than €409.26 billion, a figure that suggests demand is not cooling anytime soon.
Where the momentum is really coming from
YouTube advertising brought in €8.79 billion, up from €7.95 billion a year earlier, showing that the video giant is still expanding even in a more mature phase of its business. Meanwhile, the division Google calls subscriptions, platforms, and devices, which includes hardware, Play Store revenue, and YouTube non ad income, delivered €11.02 billion, compared with €9.24 billion in the same quarter last year.
One number says a lot about where Google is heading next: paid subscriptions across the company have now reached 350 million. YouTube and Google One remain the main drivers, but the stronger signal may be what is happening around Gemini. Pichai said Gemini Enterprise paid monthly active users grew 40% quarter over quarter, while the Gemini app helped produce Alphabet’s strongest quarter yet for consumer AI plans.
Behind the scenes, Google’s own models are being used at huge scale. Alphabet said first party models such as Gemini are now processing more than 16 billion tokens per minute through direct customer API usage, up 60% from the previous quarter. For developers, enterprise buyers, and investors alike, that is the kind of metric that turns AI ambition into something much more concrete.
Then there is Waymo, tucked inside Alphabet’s long-running Other Bets segment. Pichai highlighted that the autonomous driving business has now surpassed 500,000 fully driverless rides each week. It is a milestone that gives Alphabet a rare edge in one of tech’s most difficult races.
Not everything in the earnings report sparkled. Other Bets brought in just €365.35 million in revenue, down from €400.00 million a year earlier, while losses widened to €1.85 billion from €1.07 billion. That familiar imbalance remains part of the Alphabet story: wildly profitable core operations continue to bankroll moonshots that are still searching for sustainable commercial returns.
Still, the headline here is hard to miss. Alphabet is not simply talking about AI anymore. It is using AI to lift search, accelerate cloud, grow subscriptions, and deepen enterprise demand all at once. In a quarter packed with eye-catching numbers, that may be the clearest signal of all.
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