Sunday, December 22, 2024

Google reports third-quarter earnings next week. Here’s what to expect

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Google (GOOGL-0.07%) parent Alphabet is set to report third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, after beating second-quarter earnings expectations on artificial intelligence momentum.

The tech giant is expected to report revenues of around $86.4 billion for the third quarter, according to analyst estimates compiled by FactSet (FDS-1.54%). Google’s U.S. revenues are expected to be $40.6 billion, and its “rest of the world” revenues are expected at $45 billion. The company is expected to report earnings per share, or EPS, of $1.84, according to FactSet.

In the second quarter, Google reported revenues of nearly $85 billion, outdoing Wall Street’s expectations by around $640 million. Google’s revenue was up 14% year over year, and its Cloud division surpassed $10 billion in quarterly revenues for the first time, Google president Ruth Porat said. Google Cloud also exceeded $1 billion in operating profit for the first time.

“Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a statement at the time. “We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack. Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as technology evolves and as we pursue the many opportunities ahead.”

In recent months, Google has reportedly made progress on software for AI models that resembles humanlike reasoning abilities. The company has long focused on “reasoning” capabilities in large language models (LLMs), including with its work on chain-of-thought prompting.

With this technique, which people told Bloomberg Google is using, LLMs can solve multistep problems using a “series of intermediate reasoning steps,” similar to the way a human would. OpenAI unveiled its “reasoning” model series, OpenAI o1, in September.

Google is also working on improving its Gemini chatbot’s “reasoning” abilities. In July, Google made its fastest, most cost-efficient model, 1.5 Flash, available in the unpaid version of Gemini.

Shares of Google are up around 18% so far this year.

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