Alphabet earnings triumph after poor session for tech stocks

Alphabet (GOOGL) beats Wall Street consensus for both the top and bottom lines on Wednesday. The search giant reported $2.82 in adjusted earnings per share (EPS) on $113.82 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter that ended in December. The result beat the consensus by $0.18 on the bottom line and $2.34 billion on the top line.

Shares of GOOGL initially fell after the market took stock of the whopping $175 billion to $185 billion guidance for capex this calendar year but then gained 3% later in the afterhours session. Alphabet's positive showing was good news for tech investors, who witnessed the NASDAQ 100 lose 1.77% in the regular session — its second straight day of major losses.

Net income increased a full 30% from a year earlier to $34.46 billion, while the revenue gained 18% in that timespan.

Google Cloud revenue shot up 48% YoY to $17.7 billion, while the much larger Services segment increased 14% YoY to 95.5 billion. Search saw revenue rise 17% YoY; YouTube ads gained 9% in that time frame; but, the Google Ad Network saw a 2% decline.

“It was a tremendous quarter for Alphabet and annual revenues exceeded $400 billion for the first time," CEO Sundar Pichai said in initial reaction to the report. "The launch of Gemini 3 was a major milestone and we have great momentum. Our first-party models, like Gemini, now process over 10 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, and the Gemini App has grown to over 750 million monthly active users. Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment."