Alphabet reports Q2 2026 results with cloud backlog near $514bn
Alphabet's Q2 2026 revenue rose 24% and Google Cloud revenue rose 82%, but the stock fell as the company raised full-year capex guidance to as much as $205bn.
- Money & business
- Compute & infrastructure
- Notable
Alphabet reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $119.8bn, up 24% year on year, beating analyst estimates. Google Cloud revenue rose 82% to $24.8bn, and the company said Cloud’s contract backlog — future revenue booked but not yet delivered — had grown to roughly $514bn, up from about $460bn the previous quarter and from $106bn a year earlier, an indicator of demand for AI-related cloud computing running well ahead of what Google had yet been able to bill.
Cloud profitability improved alongside growth: the segment’s operating margin rose to 35.6%, from 20.7% a year earlier, suggesting the business had moved past pure build-out and was converting infrastructure spend into profit at scale.
Despite the beat, Alphabet’s stock fell after the results, driven by capital-expenditure guidance. The company raised its full-year 2026 capex range to $195bn–$205bn, up from $180bn–$190bn, and warned that 2027 spending would rise further still. The market reaction — a strong quarter overshadowed by the scale of continued AI infrastructure spending — echoed similar reactions to Microsoft’s and Meta’s results the same week, all reported as investors weighed whether the current pace of AI capital expenditure was translating into durable revenue or building toward overcapacity.