Texas Governor Abbott And Google Make Economic Development Announcement In Midlothian

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai (Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

Alphabet beat earnings and revenue expectations

Google’s parent company posted earnings Wednesday.

2/4/26 4:07PM

Alphabet released its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday. The search giant reported earnings per share of $2.82, beating the FactSet analyst consensus of $2.63. The Google parent’s revenue was $113.8 billion, compared with Wall Street’s expectation of $111.3 billion.

For comparison, Alphabet reported EPS of $2.15 and revenue of $96.47 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The search giant reported full-year capital expenditure to be $91.4 billion, in line with its own expectations. However, the company’s 2026 capex is expected to be way higher than analysts thought: $175 billion to $185 billion, versus analysts’ $115.6 billion.

Let’s break down the results for Alphabet’s many divisions:

📺 YouTube’s Q4 ad revenue rose 9% to $11.4 billion.
☁️ Google Cloud revenue for the fourth quarter was $17.7 billion, rising 48% year over year.
🔎 Google’s Search business brought in $63.1 billion, up 17%.
💰 Google advertising revenue was $82.3 billion, a 14% increase year over year.

The search giant has been riding high following the widely praised release of Gemini 3 in November, as well as growing enthusiasm around its lucrative tensor processing unit semiconductor business. Prior to the earnings report, the stock was up more than 60% in the last 12 months.

“The launch of Gemini 3 was a major milestone and we have great momentum. Our first party models, like Gemini, now process over 10 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, and the Gemini App has grown to over 750 million monthly active users,” Google said in its press release. “Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment.”

$GOOGL grew Google Cloud revenues 48% over the last year. 56.4 cents of every new dollar of revenue flowed to operating income. That is...astounding. $5.7bn of new revenue, $3.2bn of new operating income.

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— George Pearkes (@peark.es) February 4, 2026 at 4:31 PM

Like with every other Big Tech company, investors will be looking for more details on how exactly AI is impacting its top and bottom lines — and how much it’s spending to get there.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5