Alphabet’s record Q1

Search and Cloud continue to deliver, as Alphabet announces its first-ever dividend

4/26/24 10:45AM

Alphabet arguably posted the pick of the big tech earnings yesterday, reporting more than $80bn in revenue and a record $25.5bn in operating income. What really got investors going, however, was the news that the company would pay its first-ever dividend alongside a $70bn share buyback plan, sending shares up more than 10% and taking Alphabet into the coveted $2 trillion market cap club.

Reports of the death of Google Search…

… might be exaggerated. Or, at least, early.

In recent years, a number of articles — including a particularly sharp one from Ed Zitron just this week — have outlined the demise of Google Search. While it may be harder than ever to find what you’re looking for on Google, that hasn’t translated into any discernible impact on the search giant's bottom line (yet). The search engine raked in over $46bn in ad sales in Q1 alone... translating to ~$20m of revenue every hour.

Plugging more sponsored results at the top of the Google search bar might make for a worse user experience, but, for now, it also means more money for the company, which is spending a fortune on staying competitive in the AI race. Indeed, the cherry on top was the stellar performance of Google Cloud, which as a division tripled its operating profit, boosted by a rise in demand for all-things-AI (server infrastructure etc).

Why the company has decided to start paying a dividend now is somewhat curious. Maybe it’s run out of suitable ideas to invest that money into… or maybe it’s just so profitable it can do both: pay a dividend and invest for the future.

Nate Becker

16h

Paramount is doing everything except the one thing that could give its Warner Bros. bid a chance of success

Warner Bros. says “more than 93%” of its shareholders have rejected Paramount. That’s probably not going to change substantially unless Paramount boosts its offer.

Streamers continued retreating from original shows in 2025

The death of “peak TV” has not been exaggerated, per a new report from Luminate.

Max Knoblauch1/21/26

Retail display of Takis snack food in various spicy flavors in Target store, Queens, New York

America’s love for spicy food and mouth-tingling sauces has surged, but are we approaching “peak heat”?

Takis doesn’t think so, as it searches for a “Chief Intensity Officer.”

Claire Yubin Oh1/21/26

Tom Jones

reduced to tiers

1/21/26

Netflix made $1.5 billion from advertising last year, about 3% of its total revenue

The figure rose more than 2.5x last year, per the company.

Tom Jones1/20/26

OpenAI’s ARR reached over $20 billion in 2025, CFO says

Sam Altman’s $500 billion artificial intelligence behemoth hit a major financial milestone last year, according to a new blog post over the weekend from OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, as the company confirmed it had hit a more than $20 billion annual revenue run rate at the end of 2025.

Elsewhere in the blog post, Friar spent time addressing the company’s shifting goals, referencing plans to “close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it.” As has become customary in the AI company press release genre, the CFO was also keen to tout the unending growth of the business, writing:

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”

And, perhaps most importantly for current backers and those keeping an eye on the private company before its rumored mega IPO:

“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale.”

That latest figure has certainly set tongues in the tech world wagging, just as the company announced it would begin rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users. It also puts the chatbot giant a fair way ahead of competitors like Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

OpenAI Anthropic ARR race — Sherwood News

A business that scales with the value of intelligence

“Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization.”
“Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, and ~1.9 GW in 2025.”