MW Why Alphabet's stock is the standout gainer on Big Tech's monster earnings day

By Christine Ji

Alphabet's earnings beat and strong cloud growth are helping to justify raised spending projections

Shares of Alphabet rose 7% in after-market trading following the earnings call.

Alphabet, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms and Microsoft all beat earnings expectations on Wednesday, but investors are cheering Alphabet's momentum the most.

Shares of the Google parent company $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$ were up 7% in the extended session on the back of massive cloud growth.

Amazon shares (AMZN) had a choppier reaction, initially rising 1% before climbing 5%. Microsoft shares $(MSFT)$ dropped 3% before flipping fractionally higher. Meta Platforms shares (META) were the biggest loser, down 6%.

"Google Cloud is differentiated because we are the only provider to offer first-party solutions across the entire enterprise AI stack," CEO Sundar Pichai said on Wednesday's earnings call, referencing how Google owns every part of the AI chain, from chips to frontier models. Investors rewarded Alphabet for robust Google Cloud performance, which blew past expectations with 63% revenue growth from a year earlier, a massive acceleration.

Recap: Alphabet earnings send the stock higher. The company just posted massive cloud growth.

For the first time, enterprise AI solutions became the primary growth driver in the cloud division as customers coded agentic applications on the Gemini platform. Google's tensor processing units have led to cost efficiencies internally, and the company said on the earnings call that it's planning to deliver chips for customers to deploy in their own data centers soon. Google Cloud's backlog nearly doubled sequentially to $462 billion thanks to AI demand and TPU hardware sales, showing off Alphabet's vertical-integration advantage.

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Investors were so dazzled by Google Cloud's growth that they were willing to overlook increased capital expenditures - or perhaps saw them as necessary to fuel continued growth. On the earnings call, Alphabet announced that it would be raising full-year capex projections to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion previously. Alphabet also hinted that capex plans for 2027 are expected to "significantly increase."

The rest of the hyperscalers didn't receive the same treatment. Although Amazon Web Services accelerated to 28% growth this quarter, the results fell a hair short of the 28% to 30% target, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill wrote in a note following earnings. Microsoft reported a 5 million quarter-over-quarter increase in paid Copilot subscriptions, but Azure revenue growth of 39% was only in-line with estimates, Thill added. Microsoft plans to spend $190 billion in capex this year.

Although Meta's revenue growth of 33% exceeded expectations, that wasn't enough momentum to justify its increase in capex in the eyes of investors. Meta now plans to spend $125 billion to $145 billion in 2026, up from a prior outlook of between $115 billion to $135 billion. Unlike the other three hyperscalers, Meta doesn't have a cloud business that sells AI computing to customers.

"While Meta is being questioned for its spending, Alphabet's investment is being rewarded because it's backed by a $460 billion order backlog," Jake Behan, head of capital markets at Direxion, wrote in a Wednesday note.

-Christine Ji

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April 29, 2026 19:04 ET (23:04 GMT)

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