Quick Read – GOOG beat Q2 with Cloud up 82% and margins expanding to 34%, while META missed EPS by 14% as total costs jumped 55%. – Both companies’ free cash flow cratered as AI capex surged, with Alphabet turning negative $6B and Meta’s falling 91% to just $784M. – Meta faces…
priced risk from 2026 youth-related U.S. trials while Zuckerberg guides full-year capex to a range of $130 billion to $145 billion with expenses rising to $169 billion. – Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) both dropped Q2 2026 results in late July, with sharply diverging results. Google leaned on Cloud and Gemini adoption to power a clean beat
Meta grew ad revenue at a healthy clip but watched costs blow past guidance, snapping a long earnings streak and rattling investors. Cloud Carries Google. Costs Bite Meta.
Alphabet posted revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24.23% year over year, with Google Cloud accelerating to $24.77 billion and 82% growth. Sundar Pichai told investors that “nearly 90% of the Fortune 100” now use Gemini Enterprise, while Gemini models process 22 billion API tokens per minute. Search still did the heavy lifting at $63.27 billion, up 17%, and YouTube pulled in 1.7 billion unique viewers for World Cup content.