So, it's that time of the quarter again. The time when the great and powerful Oz—I mean, Alphabet—pulls back the curtain just enough to show Wall Street a spreadsheet. On October 29th, the tech giant will drop its Q3 earnings, and the usual cast of characters is already lining up, ready to applaud whatever numbers get tossed their way.
The stock’s already up. The analysts are predicting revenue north of $100 billion. And why wouldn't they be? The narrative is set: "Search continues to grow and Alphabet’s AI efforts continue to gain momentum." It's a nice, clean story. A little too clean, if you ask me.
Because behind all the rosy projections and back-patting is one number that should make you spit out your coffee: $85 billion.
That’s the company’s full-year capital expenditure guidance. A cool $85 billion they’re lighting on fire for what they call an "AI infrastructure arms race." And that’s the real story here. Not the earnings per share, but the sheer, mind-numbing scale of the bonfire they're building in Mountain View.
An $85 Billion Bet on... What, Exactly?
Let's be real. An "AI arms race" is just corporate PR-speak for "we're terrified of what Microsoft is doing with OpenAI, so we're going to buy every GPU Nvidia can make until we feel better." It's like two insecure billionaires competing to see who can build the bigger, gaudier mega-yacht. It's a spectacular show of wealth, but is anyone actually going anywhere?
That $85 billion isn't just a number; it's a promise. A promise that something revolutionary is just around the corner. But what is it? Is my Google search going to get magically better? Is YouTube going to stop recommending videos I watched three years ago? Or is this all just the backend plumbing for a future where AI-generated slop replaces the last vestiges of the human internet?
I’ve heard the talk. I've read the press releases. CEO Sundar Pichai called last quarter "standout." Offcourse he did. Every quarter is "standout" when you're the one on stage. He touted double-digit growth in every major business. Great. But when you’re spending the equivalent of a small country's GDP on servers, investors are right to start asking for a receipt. They want to see "sustained monetization," not just "higher depreciation."
This whole thing is a joke. No, a joke is funny—this is just a high-stakes guessing game played with our data and pension funds. They'll talk about "synergies" and "long-term investment horizons," and honestly... it's all just noise designed to distract from the fundamental question: are you building something useful, or are you just trying to keep the stock ticker green for another quarter?
The Disconnect Between the Cloud and the Street
Here’s the part that drives me crazy. The disconnect between what they’re building and what we’re experiencing. I spent ten minutes the other day arguing with the Google Assistant on my phone about a simple timer. It's a product they've had for years, and it's somehow gotten dumber. This ain't progress.
Yet we're supposed to be excited about a future where this same technology, supercharged with an $85 billion investment, runs our lives? Give me a break. The company is so focused on winning some abstract, futuristic war for AI supremacy that it feels like they’ve forgotten how to make their core products not-annoying.
And that's the tightrope they'll walk on the earnings call. They have to convince Wall Street that the $85 billion isn't just a panic spend. They need to prove that this mountain of cash is actually laying the foundation for new revenue, not just a monument to their own paranoia. They need to show that this isn't just about keeping up with the Joneses, or in this case, the Nadellas.
But how can they? The real fruits of this AI labor, if they ever ripen, are years away. So what we'll get instead is a performance. We'll hear buzzwords. We'll get vague promises about enterprise cloud solutions and multimodal models. We'll get a carefully massaged narrative designed to keep the momentum going.
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe this $85 billion really is building the future and not just the world's most expensive server farm that will be obsolete in five years. What do I know? I'm just a guy who wants his digital assistant to set a timer correctly.
