Alphabet posts record $112.1B profit on $99B investment gains

Alphabet's record $112.1 billion（約18兆円） quarterly profit is historically unprecedented, but the composition reveals a tension between headline-grabbing accounting and underlying business reality. The company's revenue growth—24% overall and 82% for Google Cloud—is genuinely impressive and CEO Sundar Pichai framed it as validation of the company's "full stack approach to AI." Yet nearly 90% of the record net income stems not from these operations but from paper gains on Anthropic and SpaceX valuations, which soared in Q2 following SpaceX's June public offering at $1.77 trillion（約280兆円） (up from $400 billion（約64兆円）) and Anthropic's private-market jump from $350 billion（約56兆円） to $965 billion（約150兆円）.

The structure underlying these gains creates what tax and accounting consultant Robert Willens has called a potential circularity: Alphabet deploys capital into Anthropic; Anthropic turns around and spends billions of its raised capital on Google Cloud computing, inflating the Cloud segment's growth metrics; Anthropic's valuation climbs as a result; and Alphabet books the unrealized gains as earnings. In this loop, the same dollars flow through multiple stages of Alphabet's business and investment portfolio, allowing the company to report record profits while the actual cash flow and independent revenue generation tell a narrower story. The market appeared skeptical of this arrangement: despite the earnings records, shares fell 3% after-hours as investors focused on sharply rising capital expenditure plans ($195–$205 billion（約33兆円） for 2026, up from $180–$190 billion（約30兆円）) and mounting competition in AI models.