Alphabet has recorded negative free cash flow for the first time amid large-scale investments in AI
7/23/2026, 10:43 AM • Евгения Слив

In the second quarter of this year, Alphabet Corporation demonstrated significant revenue growth of twenty-four percent, reaching one hundred nineteen point eight billion dollars. Despite this positive financial result, the company recorded negative free cash flow of minus five point nine billion dollars for the first time in its public history. This was a direct result of large-scale investments in the development of artificial intelligence infrastructure. In the reporting period, the total expenses of the organization amounted to forty–five billion dollars, with sixty percent of the funds allocated for the purchase of server equipment, and the remaining forty percent for the modernization and construction of data centers. In this regard, management has significantly revised its financial expectations, raising the forecast of annual costs for artificial intelligence technologies to a range of one hundred and ninety-five to two hundred and five billion dollars.
However, the April-June period marked the tech giant's twelfth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth. The company's operating profit increased by thirty percent, and marginality expanded by two percentage points, reaching the level of thirty-four percent. The organization's net profit increased to one hundred and twelve point one billion dollars, which was largely facilitated by an unrealized revaluation of the value of equity securities. The main driver of the financial stability of the quarter remained the Google Cloud cloud division, whose revenue showed an impressive jump of eighty-two percent, amounting to twenty-four point eight billion dollars. Management attributes this acceleration to the steady corporate demand for the platform in the segment of specialized infrastructure for artificial intelligence.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized that artificial intelligence technologies are already deeply integrated into key ecosystem products, in particular into the search engine, where users are gradually moving to a single experiential interaction based on new algorithms. He also noted the steady growth of the Gemini intelligent assistant audience, calling the current quarter indicative of the commercial demand for cloud solutions. However, investors received the financial results ambiguously: despite the strong revenue figures, the new trajectory of operating expenses caused some caution in the market. As a result, after the publication of the report, the company's shares adjusted down by more than four percent in the evening trading session. Earlier, the corporation had already announced plans to raise eighty billion dollars through the placement of additional shares to further scale the technological infrastructure.
