Google pushes back on AI race concerns, Sundar Pichai reports strong Q2 results: ‘Exciting times’
letter CEO Sundar Pichai The company used its second-quarter earnings to counter growing criticism that Google is losing steam in the artificial intelligence race.
Investors took a closer look at Google’s artificial intelligence strategy in Alphabet’s latest earnings report amid fierce competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and emerging Chinese artificial intelligence companies.
Pichai said the company’s investments are “redefining what’s possible” across all of its companies, from search and Google Cloud to YouTube and the Gemini AI platform, while highlighting the company’s impressive financial success and rapid adoption of artificial intelligence.
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Pichai highlights artificial intelligence to lead growth across Google
After the earnings report was released, Pichai called the quarter “amazing” in an article published on X and said that artificial intelligence investments are reshaping every part of Alphabet’s business.
He wrote, “Alphabet revenue grew 24% year over year, and Google Cloud growth accelerated to 82%.” Pichai also highlighted the momentum of Google’s core consumer businesses, including search, YouTube and Gemini applications.
According to Pichai, the number of monthly active users of the Gemini app has reached 950 million. He also said that Google’s artificial intelligence model API now processes 22 billion tokens per minute, compared with more than 16 billion in the previous quarter. Pichai said the growth was primarily driven by the company’s Gemini Flash model, which is designed for faster, lower-cost AI workloads.
“We’re also seeing widespread adoption of Gemini Enterprise, with 90 percent of the Fortune 100 using it, and strong demand for our security solutions,” he added.
He thanked employees and partners around the world, calling it an “exciting time” for the company.
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Google defends its AI strategy against competition
The earnings update comes as Alphabet faces increasing scrutiny over its position in the fast-growing artificial intelligence market.
Investors are reportedly questioning whether Google has given up its technology lead after delaying the release of the Gemini 3.5 Pro, a flagship model originally scheduled to launch in June.
Pichai in his Comment On the earnings call, he wrote: “Gemini 3.5 Pro is currently in testing. Our team is already building the next generation model. We have begun our most ambitious Gemini 4 pre-training to date and are excited about the progress we are seeing on the leading edge.”
The delay raised concerns about rivals gaining ground in areas such as artificial intelligence coding and advanced inference models. Pichai defended Google’s long-term AI strategy in response to these concerns during the earnings call.
He said assessing AI leadership requires looking beyond individual model releases and considering a company’s broader ecosystem, including infrastructure, developer platforms, enterprise adoption and consumer products.
Google is increasingly integrating Gemini into its products, including search, workspace, Android and cloud. The company also continues to expand its AI overview and AI-driven search capabilities, positioning generative AI as a core part of its future search business.
