Google had a massive quarter thanks to Search and AI

Google made nearly $85 billion over the past few months as revenue from its Search and cloud computing businesses soared. That’s according to the quarter two earnings report released by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, on Tuesday, which says Search alone raked in $48.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Google’s cloud division hit $10 billion for the first time while also achieving $1 billion in operating profit. During an earnings call on Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company’s generative AI solutions for Cloud customers “already generated billions in revenues and are being used by more than 2 million developers.”

“We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack,” Pichai says in a letter to investors. “Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as technology evolves and as we pursue the many opportunities ahead.” Earlier this month, Google reportedly weighed acquiring the startup Wiz for $23 billion to help bolster its cloud security portfolio, but Wiz turned down the deal to move forward with an initial public offering, according to CNBC.

After hitting a $2 trillion market cap in April, Google began rolling out AI Overviews in Search powered by its large language model (LLM), Gemini. But users quickly found that the tool provided bizarre answers for certain queries, leading Google to manually take them down. Still, Pichai says AI Overviews have led to “increases in Search usage and increased user satisfaction with the results.”

This week, Google also announced that it’s abandoning its long-delayed plans to phase out third-party cookies by default, something Safari and Firefox already do. Google Chrome will instead ask users to “make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.” During Google’s earnings call, Pichai said he believes “user choice is the best path forward,” adding that the company will continue “investments in privacy enhancing technologies” while taking “feedback from the players in the ecosystem.”

Other areas of Alphabet saw growth as well. Google’s advertising business ballooned to $64.6 billion, while YouTube ads rose 13 percent year over year to $8.6 billion. The division including subscriptions, platforms, and devices made $9.3 billion. Google will likely see another big boost in business following its earlier-than-usual hardware event coming in August, where it’s going to launch the already-revealed Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Correction, July 23rd: A previous version of the article misstated that Google made $85 million when it actually made $85 billion.