The stakes were high and, thanks to the company’s furious comeback in the race to dominate every aspect of AI development and implementation, so was the bar.

Alphabet on Wednesday said overall revenue in Q4 was $113.83 billion, up 18% YoY and ahead of the $111.50 billion consensus.

This was the first set of results since Google shook up the AI leaderboard hierarchy in late November when, much to the chagrin of the OpenAI complex, Gemini 3 outperformed incumbent models on key industry benchmarks, prompting Sam Altman to declare a company-wide “code red.”

Insult to injury: Gemini 3 was trained on Google’s own proprietary Tensor Processing Units, which is to say not on Nvidia’s chips.

As the figure below reminds you, things haven’t been the same since.

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. And a lot of market-cap. Specifically, about $1.5 trillion since early September and $500 billion just since the Gemini 3 unveil. On the back of those gains, Alphabet came into earnings worth more than $4 trillion, within shouting distance of stealing the world’s most valuable company title from Nvidia.

Sundar Pichai described last quarter as “tremendous” and lauded the Gemini 3 launch as “a major milestone” that handed Alphabet “great momentum.” The Gemini App has more than 750 million monthly active users, and the integration with search — it’s pretty hard to avoid Gemini now if you haven’t noticed — is going well. Pichai boasted of an “expansionary moment.”

Going line by line through the revenue breakdown, ad revenue (which includes Search and YouTube) grew 13.56%, subscriptions 16.72% and, critically, Cloud 47.75%. That’s a big beat on the growth driver: Consensus expected $16.20 billion in Cloud sales. Google delivered $17.66 billion. That should offset a small miss from YouTube ads, and should also overshadow higher-than-expected TACs.

As the figure shows, the overall top-line print constituted the briskest pace of sales growth for Alphabet since the March quarter of 2022.

The issue — or I should say one potential issue — is the capex outlook which… well, the midpoint’s $180 billion for 2026. That’s almost double last year’s outlays, and seems to stretch the definitional limits of the word “significant,” which Alphabet used last quarter to describe the expected spending increase for the full year 2026.

Also, as impressive as the numbers are, they aren’t the kind of beats that are likely to drive additional outsized gains for a stock that’s already up 75% in 13 months. That’s not to say Alphabet won’t rise post-earnings. It’s just that a lot of good news is priced.

Alphabet had one thing going for it when it was viewed as being hopelessly behind in the AI race: It was cheap. It ain’t no more, if readers will pardon the lapse into a colloquial cadence.

As the figure above shows, the stock trades the richest in nearly two decades.

So, did they do enough? That’s not for me to decide, but I’d note that prior to earnings, the bull case for Alphabet essentially said the company’s in the process of establishing a monopoly over everything to do with AI up to and including the chips. I don’t doubt that assessment, but it might be a little premature.

Still, and as I was keen to emphasize in November and early December, Alphabet has a distinct advantage in the AI race: It can seamlessly, instantaneously and, in some cases stealthily, incorporate Gemini into Google which, for a lot of netizens, is synonymous with the internet itself.