Google parent Alphabet ad revenue sputters, capex up; shares sink 6%

Alphabet disappointed Wall Street on Tuesday (Jan 30) as holiday season advertising sales came in below expectations and the company said its spending on data centres to support its artificial intelligence plans would jump this year.

Shares fell 6 per cent in after-hours trade.

Alphabet has faced tough competition for ad budgets from other online platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon.com, and economic signals in the US have been mixed.

Ad revenue in the fourth quarter was US$65.5 billion, up from US$59.0 billion in the year-ago quarter but short of the average analyst expectation for US$66.1 billion, according to LSEG data.

"Alphabet's disappointing ad revenue numbers suggest that corporations worldwide are still uncertain about the pace of interest rate cuts from global central banks," commented Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com.

Google, inventor of foundational technology for today's AI boom, also faces tough competition from the two players that have captured the business world's attention, ChatGPT's creator OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft.

While Google's cloud revenue growth slightly topped Wall Street targets, boosted by interest in AI, Microsoft's Azure grew faster.

Rolling out AI and cloud services requires heavy investment in data centres and research. Capital expenditures shot up 45 per cent to US$11 billion, the highest in years, and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat told analysts on a conference call that capex would be notably larger this year compared with 2023.

Google is bringing a powerful suite of models called Gemini to its ChatGPT rival Bard. It struck a deal to invest up to US$2 billion in high-profile AI startup Anthropic as it courts customers from larger cloud rivals Microsoft and Amazon, and it is putting Gemini into advertisers' hands so their dollars keep flowing to Google's search business.

Still, AI's advertising boost may remain far off, in a period of concern that geopolitical and economic uncertainty could discourage ad buyers. The US has started probing AI investments including Alphabet's, Google is gearing up to appeal a major antitrust case it lost, and the company like others in technology has been cutting jobs.

Overall revenue for the quarter ended Dec 31 stood at US$86.3 billion, compared with estimates of US$85.3 billion, according to LSEG data.

Investors have grown more interested in the fortunes of Google Cloud. Last year the division earned its first-ever quarterly profit, but revenue growth slowed as customers streamlined cloud spending.

Microsoft has been a fierce competitor, adding AI to its cloud and productivity suite long embraced by enterprises, while Google has marketed rival tools. OpenAI's November 2022 launch of ChatGPT ignited a frenzy over generative AI, which can conjure new text and images on command.

Alphabet said Google Cloud revenue in the latest quarter was US$9.2 billion, while analysts were expecting US$8.9 billion. That marked a re-acceleration of cloud revenue growth from the previous quarter to 25.7 per cent but was slower than 32 per cent growth in the year-ago quarter. Microsoft on Tuesday reported that sales of its cloud product, Azure, grew at 30 per cent.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts that cloud growth was driven in part by generative artificial intelligence.