Alphabet jumps 6% on Q3 earnings as CEO says AI bet is ‘paying off’

Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) saw its share price jump 5.9% after-hours as its third-quarter results beat Wall Street earnings and revenue estimates — boosted by its artificial intelligence business.

GOOG closed up 1.66% on Oct. 29 at $171.14, continuing to climb after the bell to $181.22, according to Yahoo Finance. Its share price is up 21.73% year-to-date.

The tech giant’s Q3 revenues hit $88.27 billion, rising 15% from the same quarter a year ago and beating Wall Street estimates by 2.2%.

Its quarterly earnings rose 35% from Q3 2023 to $2.12 per share, beating the $1.85 earnings per share estimate by 13.6%.

Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) has continued to climb nearly 6% after the close of trading on Oct. 29. Source: Yahoo Finance

Its Google Cloud revenues jumped 35% year-on-year to $11.4 billion, with Alphabet saying it saw growth across its AI infrastructure and generative AI products.

“The long-term focus and investment in AI are paying off and driving success for the company and for our customers,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on an Oct. 29 earnings call.

Alphabet’s strong Q3 results come ahead of earnings for its Big Tech rivals this week, with Meta and Microsoft scheduled to report on Oct. 30, then Amazon and Apple the day after on Oct. 31.

The so-called MAMAA stocks have rocketed in price this year, with all of the firms heavily invested in making AI models, inking AI partnerships, or pushing out new hardware to support the compute-intensive technology.

During Q3, in August, Google shipped its latest top-of-the-range AI model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, which beat the then industry-leading GPT-4o from OpenAI in benchmarking tests.

Pichai said on the call that Google is using AI in its coding, which he claimed has boosted productivity.

Related: Meta is reportedly building its own AI-powered search engine

“Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers,” he said.

Alphabet’s biggest revenue generator was its Google Ads business, which brought in $65.86 billion in Q3, up 10.4% from the year-ago quarter.

Its flagship Google Search business was its second-biggest taker, with $49.39 billion in revenues, up 10.9% from 2023’s third quarter.

AI Eye: Insane Satoshi podcast created in seconds, Crypto + AI outperform memecoins