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Sundar Pichai In Warsaw
(Klaudia Radecka/Getty Images)

Google earnings and revenue blow past Wall Street’s expectations

Alphabet’s stock is soaring in early trading on Thursday.

Google is still rising, up almost 8% in premarket trading as of 5:20 a.m. ET, after it posted fiscal third-quarter earnings that surpassed Wall Street’s expectations yesterday evening, helped by big growth in its Google Cloud business.

For the quarter, the search giant’s parent company, Alphabet, reported earnings per share of $2.87, compared with FactSet analyst estimates of $2.26. Alphabet posted $102.3 billion in revenue. Analysts were expecting revenue of $99.9 billion.

Google’s parent company boosted its full-year capital expenditure outlook to between $91 billion and $93 billion, compared with its previous roughly $85 billion level.

“Better ad targeting likely contributed to a further sequential increase in growth for core Search and YouTube ads to around 15% for each segment, while Gemini’s token usage of 7 billion per minute for its API business is around that of leading frontier models such as OpenAI,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar wrote yesterday.

Let’s break down the results for Alphabet’s many divisions:

  • 📺 YouTube’s Q3 ad revenue rose 15% to $10.3 billion.

  • ☁️ Google Cloud revenue for Q3 was $15.2 billion, rising 34% year over year, driven by growth in its AI Infrastructure and Generative AI Solutions division. Analysts were expecting revenue of $14.7 billion and 29.5% year-on-year revenue growth. And this business ended the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.

  • 🔎 Google’s Search business brought in $56.6 billion, up 14.5%.

  • 💰 Google advertising revenue was $74.2 billion, a 12.6% increase year over year.

The company is expected to release Gemini 3 in December, a major update to its flagship AI model, and Bloomberg reported that Apple may be working to use Gemini to power an AI-enhanced Siri.

Alphabet must be breathing easy after a September decision by a federal judge to not break the company up as remedy to the federal antitrust case against it, which found that the company held a monopoly in search and online advertising. Other remedies are still under consideration by the court.

In the earnings release, CEO Sundar Pichai said Alphabet’s Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users.

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Stocks soar as US and Iran reach deal to open Strait of Hormuz, end the war

The details of the framework for peace are not yet available.

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AMD shares climb on double Citi upgrade to “buy” with $575 price target

AMD’s shares are rising in premarket trading following a double upgrade from Citi. Citi analyst Atif Malik raised AMD’s investment rating to “buy” from “neutral” and boosted the bank’s 12-month price target to $575 from $460 per share, per Barron’s.

Malik argued that the broader market currently misprices AMD by looking at it primarily as a CPU producer, underestimating its massive GPU potential. Citi says that AMD is uniquely “poised to win the lion’s share” of Meta’s customized graphics chip business. Meta is leaning into AMD’s custom MI450 chips, which deliver a lower total cost of ownership compared to buying traditional off-the-shelf merchant hardware, according to Investing.com.

Citi highlighted a massive multiyear deal between the two tech giants involving a 160 million-share common stock warrant. As the first phase ramps up through 2027, Citi expects each gigawatt of data center infrastructure to translate into roughly $15 billion in revenue. Consequently, Citi hiked its 2027 AMD AI sales forecast to $33 billion (up 137% year over year) and projects GPU sales to reach $50.8 billion by 2028.

CEO Lisa Su recently delivered an optimistic demand forecast, predicting that the global market for CPUs will grow by more than 35% annually over the next five years. The chipmaker delivered a robust Q1 earnings report back in May that beat Wall Street expectations across key data center segments.

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Astera Labs, CoreWeave, Nebius, Rocket Lab, Teradyne rise on Nasdaq 100 Index inclusion announcement

Tech stocks Astera Labs, CoreWeave, Nebius, Rocket Lab, and Teradyne have risen as much as 8.9% in premarket trading on Friday, thanks in part to Nasdaq’s announcement that the five companies will join its flagship Nasdaq 100 Index starting June 22.

As part of the index operator’s quarterly rebalance, which affects some $1.4 trillion in assets within the Nasdaq 100 ecosystem, the companies will replace Charter, Zscaler, Cognizant, Insmed, and Verisk — relatively slow-growth legacy businesses that have lingered around the bottom of the index in market cap terms of late. Most of those stocks slipped slightly on the news.

With CoreWeave and Nebius as two of the major players in the neocloud space, and Astera Labs and Teradyne specializing in making AI hardware and semiconductors, the latest additions reflect how the index is upping its exposure to the AI infrastructure stack. Back in December, Nasdaq also added AI data storage names Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital, as well as AI server manager Monolithic Power Systems, as part of its quarterly rebalance.

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Jon Keegan

Adobe beats on Q2 earnings, revenue; CFO to step down

Adobe reported fiscal Q2 results Thursday, beating analysts’ estimates for revenue and earnings, as its stock plumbed its lowest levels since 2019.

For Q2 2026, the creative software company posted:

  • Revenues of $6.62 billion (estimate: $6.45 billion).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $5.96 (estimate: $5.82).

  • Annual recurring revenue of $27.1 billion (estimate: $26.6 billion).

  • Subscription revenue of $6.42 billion (estimate: $6.27 billion).

  • Remaining performance obligations of $22.27 billion (estimate: $21.86 billion).

The company also said its CFO, Dan Durn, would step down next week “to pursue a new professional opportunity.” And it boosted its full-year guidance for earnings and revenue.

Shares fell 5.5% in after-hours trading.

Adobe is feeling the pressure from AI, as the April release of Anthropic’s Claude Design threatens the company’s core design software business. Shares have tanked lately, with the stock down by nearly half over the past 12 months, putting it at levels not seen in years.

Last quarter, Adobe announced that CEO Shantanu Narayen, who had been at the company for 18 years, would be leaving after his successor was appointed. Today, Adobe announced that CFO Dan Durn would also be leaving the company — this month.

Adobe announced a $25 billion stock buyback in April, which gave the stock a boost. The company said it repurchased about 8.5 million shares during the quarter.

In a press release, Narayen said:

“Adobe delivered record revenue of $6.62 billion in Q2 reflecting strong AI-driven demand across our customer groups and we are raising our full-year fiscal 2026 revenue and non-GAAP EPS targets on the strength of that performance.”

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