Alphabet Tops $4.5T After AI Beat; Meta Slumps on Capex
Alphabet’s market value rose above $4.5 trillion after Q1 cloud and AI beats, gaining over $300 billion; Meta lost about $175 billion after raising capex guidance.
On April 30, investors pushed Alphabet’s market capitalization above $4.5 trillion following the company’s Q1 2026 results, reported after the market close on April 29. The single session added more than $300 billion to Alphabet’s value while Meta Platforms lost roughly $175 billion on the same day.
Google Cloud generated $20.0 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 63% year over year, and backlog climbed to more than $460 billion, nearly doubling sequentially. Alphabet wrote in its earnings release: “Google Cloud saw a meaningful acceleration in growth as revenues increased 63% to $20.0 billion, led by an increase in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across enterprise AI Solutions and enterprise AI Infrastructure, as well as core GCP services.” The company reported search queries reached an all-time high after integrating Gemini, and consumer AI subscriptions exceeded 350 million. Alphabet also raised its dividend by 5%.
Alphabet’s capital expenditures for the quarter were $35.7 billion. The company raised full-year 2026 capex guidance to a range of $180 billion to $190 billion and said 2027 spending would be “significantly higher.” Alphabet said the increase in guidance reflected investments in data centers and AI infrastructure. At the time of reporting, Alphabet shares traded near an all-time high around $377.62.
Alphabet’s $4.5 trillion valuation exceeds the annual GDP of Japan, about $4.2 trillion, and India, about $4.1 trillion. The company said the increased spending will focus on data-center capacity, GPUs, power and grid upgrades.
Some publicly listed Bitcoin miners have signed AI hosting contracts and begun providing rack space and compute capacity for AI workloads, moving a portion of their operations into AI hosting services.
Meta reported revenue that beat expectations for the quarter but issued higher capital-spending guidance. Investors reacted to Meta’s guidance on April 30, reducing the company’s market value by about $175 billion. Traders cited the contrast between Alphabet’s visible cloud and AI revenue and Meta’s larger forward spending plans when assessing the results.
Alphabet noted enterprise AI demand outpaced supply during the quarter and cited that dynamic as a factor in its cloud growth. The companies’ filings and investor activity during the session showed attention to how current and planned spending converts into revenue and backlog.
