Google Q2 2026: Cloud Grows 82%, Gemini Hits 950M Users, CapEx Doubles to $44.9B

Cloud at 82% — The AI Infrastructure Trade Is Working

Alphabet revenues grew 24% year-over-year and Google Cloud revenues accelerated to 82% growth, driven by demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions. Nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 are using Gemini Enterprise. The 82% Cloud growth is a meaningful acceleration from the 63% growth Google Cloud posted in Q1 2026 and the 48% growth in Q4 2025. The direction is clear: enterprise AI spending is accelerating, and Google Cloud is capturing a growing share of it.

Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute and the Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users. For context: 950 million monthly active users puts Gemini 50 million away from a billion — making it likely to cross that threshold in Q3 2026. Pichai cited demand for AI infrastructure and solutions as the driver of Cloud's acceleration, noting that AI is additive to search, not a replacement, with search query growth driven by popular AI features.

The CapEx Story — $44.9B in One Quarter

Google reported $44.9 billion in capital expenditures in Q2 2026, representing 100% growth year-over-year. To put that in context: $44.9B in a single quarter equals Anthropic's entire Colossus 1 compute deal ($1.25B/month × 36 months = $45B) spent in 90 days. Alphabet raised $49.6 billion by issuing stock in June and brought in $20.3 billion from senior unsecured notes in the second quarter to support AI infrastructure expansion. Google is spending at a rate that dwarfs every other AI infrastructure investment announced in 2026 — and it is raising capital specifically to do more of it.

Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi noted they are in a supply-constrained environment with strong demand, and the company is not planning to return to equity markets except for addressing standard employee compensation. The supply constraint is the limiting factor — Google can spend more, and the demand is there. The bottleneck is building data center capacity fast enough to serve it.

Gemini 4 — "Very Ambitious Effort", Already Getting Compute

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the company is already dedicating resources to its Gemini 4 model as AI competition heats up. "It's a very ambitious effort," he said. The frontier is dynamic, and we are committed to being at the forefront. We are iterating on models like the 3.6 Flash, which has shown significant improvements. We are confident in our ability to compete at the frontier level.

Pichai's comments on Gemini 4 are notable given Gemini 3.5 Pro's repeated delays. Rather than defending the delays, Google is positioning Gemini 4 as the strategic leap — implying the company may be skipping iterative 3.5 Pro improvements in favour of the next generational upgrade. For enterprise buyers currently evaluating Gemini 3.5 Pro vs Claude Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol: the 3.5 Pro delay may never resolve in favour of a standalone release, with its capabilities instead absorbed into Gemini 4.

Antigravity — Google's Coding Tool at 2.4M Weekly Users

Developers are increasingly adopting Google's AI coding tool Antigravity, which now has over 2.4 million weekly active users. Pichai noted that in Antigravity, users can select models from Google and from Anthropic, along with an open model OpenAI released last year. Options from Chinese labs DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.ai are not available. The Chinese lab exclusion is significant given that Kimi K3 is now the strongest open-weight coding model available. Antigravity offering Claude (Anthropic) models alongside Gemini models reinforces the Anthropic-Google partnership — and makes Google's $44.9B CapEx quarter relevant to Anthropic's model training capacity.

What the Numbers Mean for the AI Market

Sources: Alphabet Q2 2026 Earnings Release (SEC) · CNBC · 9to5Google · Yahoo Finance · Benzinga · TradingKey · Related: Gemini 3.6 Flash full review → · Gemini 3.6 Flash vs Claude Sonnet 5 →