Mountain View
Cloudy outlook: Advertising revenue at Google’s parent Alphabet fell to $54.5bn in the first quarter, a decrease of around 1% from a year earlier. Total revenue rose by an annual 2.6% to $69.7bn. “Alphabet’s cloud business has emerged in profit-positive territory for the first time”, says Sophie Lund-Yates of Hargreaves Lansdown. “This is a feat that has undoubtedly been accelerated by the recent uplift in demand and excitement around artificial intelligence [AI]... the changing tech landscape is a tide that lifts all ships.”
But that AI race with Microsoft, whose Azure cloud-computing business rose by annual 27% in the first three months of 2023, its lowest-ever quarterly growth, “won’t come cheap”, says Dan Gallagher in The Wall Street Journal. Alphabet also reshuffled some costs from its cloud business to its core operations, which helped to account for the former’s first-ever quarterly operating profit, of $191m. “Google Cloud still has a long way to go” to catch up with Amazon’s AWS cloud unit, which was making operating profits of
