25 May 2023, Berlin: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, attends a press event to announce Google as the new official partner of the Women's National Team at Google Berlin. Photo: Christoph Soeder/dpa

(Christoph Soeder/Getty Images)

AI demand grows Alphabet revenue 15% to $88.3 billion

10/29/24 5:40PM

Google parent Alphabet’s third-quarter revenue grew 15% to $88.3 billion, with strong growth in its cloud computing business powered by AI computing demand.

“The momentum across the company is extraordinary. Our commitment to innovation, as well as our long-term focus and investment in AI, are paying off with consumers and partners benefitting from out AI tools,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a press release.

The AI rush helped Google Cloud generate revenues of $11.4 billion, a year-over-year increase of 35%. The company’s profit increased 37% to $2.1 billion.

Google’s Gemini AI model has been squeezed into pretty much all of its products, resulting in more than 2 billion monthly users of Gemini models.

Though not as sexy as the company’s many AI products, Google’s bread-and-butter search business was still a huge moneymaker, generating about 55% of Alphabet’s revenue, pulling in $49.4 billion, which grew 12% year over year.

YouTube’s Q3 ad revenue grew 12% to $8.9 billion. Youtube Shorts are really dominating the product, with 70 billion Shorts being watched every day, according to the company.

Google advertising revenue was $65.9 billion, a 10% increase year over year.

Google's Waymo self-driving taxi business is now logging more than 1 million autonomous miles and 150,000 paid rides per week.

Pichai took a moment to boast about its AI researchers, congratulating two Google DeepMind leaders Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their recent shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work related to the AlphaFold2 AI tool, as well as former Google employee Geoff Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel for Physics.

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$1.3M

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There’s still plenty of money to be made in brainrot. The top 1,000 Roblox creators earned an average of $1.3 million in 2025 — up 50% from the year prior — according to CEO Dave Baszucki on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Roblox paid out $1.5 billion to creators last year, meaning its top 1,000 creators took home about 87% of the total pool.

Like other creator economy giants, Roblox rewards its biggest creators for their contributions to user engagement. Creator-made titles like “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot” substantially boosted playing time over the course of the year. In September, the company increased its developer exchange rate, or the ratio of in-game currency to cash payout, by 8.5%.

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CFO Mandy Fields sees e.l.f. Beauty in growth mode, as company beats on sales and earnings

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Roblox answers Google’s Project Genie, launching the open beta for its “4D” AI creation tool

Roblox on Wednesday launched the open beta of its “4D” AI creation model, less than a week after the launch of Google’s Project Genie, an AI-powered interactive world generator.

The tool allows users to generate interactive objects that can be used in gameplay, such as a drivable car or a flyable plane, as opposed to static 3D objects.

Roblox’s “4D” system relies on rule sets called schemas that create objects out of multiple parts, allowing cars to have a body and movable wheels, for example.

“We expect to soon include schemas that cover the range of thousands of objects in the real world,” the company said.

The move to bring the tool out of early access and into open beta appears to be a response to Google’s Project Genie, which allows users to generate “playable” worlds out of a text or image prompt. Gaming stocks like Roblox, Take-Two, and Unity Software have dropped in the days since Project Genie’s release, though Wall Street analysts largely believe the market reaction to be unjustified, as interactivity through Google’s tool is limited.

Roblox's 4D creation feature is now available in open beta | TechCrunch