Alphabet first-quarter results likely to show continued growth, boosted by cloud

Alphabet is set to report its first-quarter earnings after the bell Wednesday.

Here's what Wall Street is looking for, according to analysts polled by LSEG:

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

Alphabet's stock has been the top performer over the past year among the tech megacaps, soaring 118% as of Tuesday's close. The company is getting a boost from its Gemini artificial intelligence models and services, as well as its cloud infrastructure business, which sells capacity to developers and users of AI tools.

Analysts are projecting 18.7% revenue growth from $90.2 billion a year earlier, which would be the company's highest rate of growth for any quarter since 2022. In the first three months of the year, Google pushed its Gemini AI models across more products — from Maps to a new AI design offering.

Google announced during the quarter that it will allow users to connect Google apps with its Gemini chatbot to do things like create personal images based on the user's private Google Photos.

Google is getting a hefty amount of growth from its cloud division, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Revenue is expected to jump 47% from $12.26 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

Along with its hyperscaler peers, Alphabet is pouring money into AI infrastructure to capitalize on exploding demand. The Google parent said in January it expects 2026 capital expenditures to be in the range of $175 billion to $185 billion. The top end of that forecast would be more than double its 2025 capex spend, and Wednesday will be the first update from the company since the U.S.-Iran war began in February, leading to a spike in oil prices.

Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are also scheduled to report quarterly results after the bell Wednesday.

At its annual Google Cloud Next conference last week, the company said it's making a change for the eighth generation of its tensor processing unit, or TPU, which is central to Google's effort to challenge Nvidia in AI chips. After years of producing chips that can both train AI models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors.

Alphabet's investments could also be a topic for investors.

The company said during the quarter that it plans to commit up to $40 billion to Anthropic in a deal that includes massive TPU compute commitments, not just cash. 

Alphabet-owned Waymo in February announced it raised $16 billion in a new round led by outside investors, valuing the company at $126 billion. Waymo said recently it's ready to bring its self-driving vehicles to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando. The company began fully autonomous operations in Nashville, ahead of a planned commercial launch with Lyft later this year.

The company also shed some equity stakes.

Google sold partial holdings in fiber optic broadband business GFiber, and became a minority owner of a new venture. Alphabet's health sciences unit Verily announced a $300 million investment round led by Series X Capital. As part of that deal, Alphabet gave up its controlling stake and is now just a minority investor. 

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