GOOGL: Alphabet Stock Rockets to Fresh Record as Capex Target Gets a Big Boost

Google parent is about to knock it out of the park at the opening, up 7% to levels near $380. Also, shares have more than doubled in the past year.

🚀 Alphabet Breaks Out

• Shares of Alphabet GOOGL jumped roughly 7% Wednesday toward a record $380 after reporting first-quarter earnings of $5.11 per share, crushing expectations near $2.63 and nearly doubling last year’s $2.81 result.
• Revenue reached about $110 billion, beating forecasts of $107 billion and rising 22% year over year — a pace that keeps Alphabet firmly in the top tier of megacap growth stories.
• With the stock already more than doubling over the past year, up 120% ahead of Thursday’s opening, traders are now asking whether this rally still has runway. And how far it can go.

☁️ Cloud Growth and Big Spending

• Google Cloud posted $20 billion in quarterly revenue, up 63%, with operating margins improving to roughly 33%. That’s a rare combination of scale growth and profitability expansion.
• Alphabet lifted its AI data-center spending target to about $190 billion this year, up from $185 billion previously, underscoring how aggressively it’s building infrastructure for enterprise AI workloads.
• Cloud backlog surged to roughly $462 billion, nearly doubling from the prior quarter — a pipeline that investors interpret as future revenue visibility rather than speculative hype.

📊 Capex Surge Reshapes the Story

• Alphabet’s capital expenditures reached nearly $36 billion in the first quarter alone, about double last year’s level, showing how quickly AI infrastructure is reshaping its financial profile.
• Free cash flow dropped to roughly $10 billion and share buybacks paused after $15 billion in repurchases a year earlier, while debt rose to $77.5 billion. Looks like growth is being funded with serious balance-sheet muscle.
• Advertising still accounts for roughly 70% of revenue, but the narrative is shifting fast. Alphabet isn’t just selling search ads anymore. Rather, it’s building the plumbing of the AI economy.