Mountain View, Google parent Alphabet has raised its capital-expenditure guidance for 2026 to between $195 billion and $205 billion, up from its previous estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion, as it accelerates the expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud-computing infrastructure.
The revised guidance was announced during Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call. The company said the additional expenditure would help expand technical infrastructure capacity, including AI servers, data centres and networking equipment, amid rising demand for Google Cloud’s enterprise AI infrastructure and solutions.
Alphabet reported capital expenditure of $44.9 billion during the second quarter. The company has also been using third-party computing capacity to address near-term supply constraints while developing its own infrastructure.
Google Cloud revenue increased 82% year-on-year to $24.8 billion during the quarter, supported by growth in enterprise AI infrastructure, enterprise AI solutions and core Google Cloud Platform services. Alphabet’s consolidated quarterly revenue increased 24% to $119.8 billion.
“Our AI investments are redefining what’s possible across every part of our business,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “Q2 was an amazing quarter, with Alphabet revenues growing 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud revenues accelerating to 82% growth, driven by demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions.”
Alphabet said Gemini models are now processing 22 billion application programming interface tokens per minute. The Gemini application has reached 950 million monthly active users, while nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies are using Gemini Enterprise.
For India, Alphabet’s increased infrastructure spending is relevant to the expanding demand for cloud and AI services among enterprises, startups and public-sector organisations. Google operates cloud regions in Mumbai and Delhi, while Indian technology-services companies and developers use its cloud and AI platforms to build and deploy enterprise applications. However, Alphabet did not disclose how much of the revised expenditure would be allocated specifically to India.
Alphabet is the holding company for businesses including Google, Google Cloud, YouTube and autonomous-driving company Waymo. Its infrastructure investments support products spanning internet search, advertising, cloud computing, generative AI and digital services.
