Google Cloud surpasses $20B, but says growth was…

Google Cloud, the business under parent company Alphabet that provides enterprise AI solutions, had a blowout first quarter, with revenues topping $20 billion for the time, a 63% increase from the same period last year. In the first quarter of 2026 , the company said its cloud growth was driven by strong performance in the Google Cloud Platform, which grew at a higher rate than the Google Cloud division’s overall revenue growth. (The Cloud division includes a variety of services like infrastructure, data analytics, AI/ML tools, and Google Workspace.) Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts on the Q1 2026 earnings call on Wednesday that this growth came from “strong demand” for Gemini Enterprise and its AI solutions, and pointed to an increased demand for infrastructure, including TPU hardware and data centers. Google Gemini Enterprise also grew 40% quarter-over-quarter, the company said, and AI token growth via its API grew to 16 billion tokens per minute, up from 10 billion in the fourth quarter.

Pichai noted other cloud milestones, including new customer acquisition doubling year-over year, deal momentum doubling the number of $100 million to $1 billion deals year-over-year, with the company signing multiple “billion-dollar-plus” deals. He spun this as a positive for the company, noting that it demonstrated how Google Cloud was different from other competitors. “Obviously, we are compute constrained in the in the near-term,” Pichai said. “And as an example, our cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet that demand. OpenAI ends Microsoft legal peril over its $50B Amazon deal DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data The Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world … will probably read this book and try even harder Two college kids raise a $5.1 million pre-seed to build an AI social network in iMessage Meta’s loss is Thinking Machines’ gain Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’

Source: TechCrunch