Alphabet, they call it. (GOOGL 0.20%). A provider of things people search for, ads they mostly ignore, and cloud computing, which is just someone else’s computer. Closed Thursday at $331.25, down a little. Not much, but enough. Eighty-seven million shares traded. A lot of activity for a company already worth more than some small countries. They went public in 2004. Thirteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven percent growth since then. Imagine. So it goes.
How Things Moved Today
The S&P 500 dropped 1.20% to 6,800. The Nasdaq Composite, not doing much better, lost 1.59% to 22,541. Tech stocks, generally, were feeling a little glum. Meta Platforms, though, managed a tiny gain (+0.18%), closing at $670.21. Amazon, however, took a bigger hit (-4.42%), finishing at $222.69. Large companies, shuffling around like cards in a deck. It’s all just numbers, really.
What This Means (If Anything)
Alphabet wobbled today after reporting earnings on Wednesday. Dropped four percent, then mostly recovered. Sales up 18%, earnings per share up 31%. Good numbers, by most standards. Wall Street, of course, always wants more. Google Search and YouTube are still bringing in the money, predictably. But the cloud backlog is the real story. Soaring 55% sequentially. More than doubling from last year. A lot of promises for the future, built on the backs of servers and electricity.
Then came the announcement: roughly $180 billion for AI-related capital expenditures. A staggering sum. Enough to solve a lot of problems, or create a lot more. The market, initially, didn’t like it. But then, they remembered that Gemini Enterprise already has 8 million seats sold, and the Gemini app boasts 750 million monthly active users. So, for now, the return on investment looks…acceptable. Though, what does “acceptable” even mean in the grand scheme of things? We build these things, these systems, and then wonder why they don’t make us happier.
It’s all a bit absurd, when you think about it. We chase growth, we accumulate wealth, and then we…what? Buy more things? The universe doesn’t care about quarterly earnings. It just keeps expanding, indifferent to our little dramas. So it goes.
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2026-02-06 01:56