Google and Microsoft Just Proved the AI Trade Is Alive—While OpenAI Is Sweating

In brief

• Google Cloud hit $20.03 billion in Q1 2026—up 63% year-over-year—while Microsoft's AI business surpassed a $37 billion annual revenue run rate, up 123% year-over-year.
• Alphabet's total Q1 revenue reached $109.9 billion, its fastest growth rate since 2022; Microsoft posted $82.9 billion in revenue, up 18%.
• OpenAI missed its own internal revenue and user targets in recent months, with CFO Sarah Friar reportedly warning the company may struggle to fund future compute contracts.

Wednesday was a bad day to be an AI doomer.

Microsoft and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, both reported earnings after the bell, and both crushed expectations—on the same day OpenAI's revenue stumbles were still reverberating through the market. The message from the two biggest players in enterprise cloud was hard to miss: The AI trade isn't slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating.

Alphabet posted $109.9 billion in Q1 2026 revenue, up 22% from a year ago and the company's fastest growth rate since 2022. Wall Street was expecting around $107.1 billion. The headline number is Google Cloud, which brought in $20.03 billion—up 63% year-over-year from $12.26 billion in Q1 2025, and nearly $1.6 billion above analyst estimates. CEO Sundar Pichai said enterprise AI solutions had become "our primary growth driver for cloud for the first time in Q1."

Microsoft wasn't far behind. The company reported $82.9 billion in revenue for its fiscal Q3 2026, up 18% year-over-year, beating the $81.39 billion estimates. The real number that turned heads: Its AI business surpassed an annual revenue run rate of $37 billion, up 123% from the prior year. Azure and other cloud services grew 40% year-over-year. Microsoft Cloud overall hit $54.5 billion, up 29%.

All of this thanks to the magic of the AI boom.

Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant for enterprise, now exceeds 20 million paid users—up from 15 million just last quarter. CEO Satya Nadella called it the "agentic computing era," which is the kind of phrase you say when your numbers back it up.