Today, Waymo operates a driverless ride-hailing service commercially in 11 major metro areas across the U.S., and is running testing or limited services in 21 other cities, including testing in London and Tokyo.<\/p>\n
According to an online database<\/a> maintained by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, Waymo now has 677 robotaxis registered in the Lone Star state, compared to 175 vehicles registered for use as driverless ride-hailing vehicles in Texas by Tesla<\/a> and 44 registered by Amazon<\/a>-owned Zoox.<\/p>\n In its first quarter<\/a> update, Baidu<\/a> said its Apollo Go robotaxi service footprint spanned 27 cities as of May 2026, and during that period, the autonomous ride-hailing service delivered 3.2 million fully driverless operational rides.<\/p>\n \u2014Lora Kolodny<\/p>\n Digital ad market looks stable, at least for now<\/p>\n Despite the war<\/a> in Iran and ongoing concerns about its impact on the broader economy, the digital advertising market appears to be humming along.<\/p>\n Analysts at Bernstein wrote in a note on Tuesday that their recent advertising channel checks “were strong for Meta<\/a> and Google,” implying that the two digital ad titans will likely report another healthy quarter of sales growth.<\/p>\n Wolfe Research analysts agree, writing in a note on Monday that their ad checks show a “resilient environment” that suggests “stability in Q2 despite macro concerns.” And they see a boost from the World Cup and upcoming midterm elections. As for threats posed by OpenAI, Wolfe’s analysts described those as “headline risks,” but said, “Google Search ad demand trends continue to imply at least stable trends.”<\/p>\n Meta reports results next week.<\/p>\n \u2014 Jonathan Vanian<\/p>\n Google’s recent AI talent exodus <\/p>\n Google’s earnings come on the heels of some major high-profile departures, as the battle for top artificial intelligence talent heats up. <\/p>\n Gemini co-head Noam Shazeer announced<\/a> in June that he was joining OpenAI, less than two years<\/a> after returning through a partnership with his startup. Senior researcher scientist John Jumper left<\/a> Google Deepmind for Anthropic last month.<\/p>\n Technology companies have spent billions in recent months to lure top talent and acquire AI capabilities. The frontier labs, however, are starting to face a new reality, as businesses begin reining in token costs and seek out cheaper alternatives. <\/p>\n Software companies have also fallen victim<\/a> to the AI talent drain as frontier labs build out the enterprise layer. <\/p>\n \u2014Samantha Subin<\/p>\n Anthropic funding set to boost Alphabet’s investment income<\/p>\n Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks during the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2026.<\/p>\n Denis Balibouse | Reuters<\/p>\n Investors will be paying attention to Alphabet’s investment income after a recent Anthropic funding round pushed up the value of Google’s holding in the model developer. <\/p>\n In 2023, Google first bought a 10% stake in Anthropic. The search company announced plans to invest up to $40 billion more<\/a> in April, having invested more than $3 billion in the startup already. By May, with Anthropic’s Claude Code gaining attention for its ability to quickly write application code, the company said investors had valued it at $965 billion<\/a>. That was up from $380 billion<\/a> as of February.<\/p>\n Alphabet is also sitting on a stake in SpaceX<\/a>, which went public<\/a> in June, after first investing $900 million in the rocket maker in 2015. SpaceX shares have drifted down about 8% since the record-setting initial public offering. <\/p>\n Three months ago, Google touted a $37 billion<\/a> gain on equity securities. <\/p>\n \u2014Jordan Novet<\/p>\n Google releases new Gemini models that are cheaper than frontier rivals Google is trying to keep up with OpenAI and Anthropic with its cutting-edge Gemini AI models, while also offering models at prices that recognize a more frugal approach to AI spending. <\/p>\n On Tuesday, the company released three new\u00a0Gemini<\/a>\u00a0models, including its clearest answer yet to\u00a0Anthropic<\/a>‘s lead in\u00a0cybersecurity<\/a>. Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber is designed to detect and patch software vulnerabilities and will initially be available only to governments and trusted partners through a limited-access pilot. Google said the specialized model runs at a lower price per token than larger models.<\/p>\n With Gemini 3.6 Flash, Google aims to bolster its coding assistant technology while using up to 17% fewer tokens and offering a lower price per token than the previous model. <\/p>\n The pricing war in AI is heating up as demand soars for open-source models, largely out of China. The hottest recent example is Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.<\/p>\n \u2014 MacKenzie Sigalos<\/p>\n Google stock headed for third straight losing month on AI concerns<\/p>\n Gemini AI signage during the Google I\/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, US, on Tuesday, May 19, 2026. <\/p>\n David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/p>\n Google’s stock is on pace for a third straight month as the company heads into the second-quarter print on mounting AI skepticism.<\/p>\n Shares are up 11% for the year but have dropped 1% in May, 6% in June and are pacing for a nearly 3% loss in July.<\/p>\n That puts the company behind Apple and Nvidia for the year.<\/p>\n Google’s stock drop comes as skepticism swirls over skyrocketing artificial intelligence spending and businesses pour billions into the infrastructure buildout.<\/p>\n \u2014 Samantha Subin<\/p>\n What about spending in 2027?<\/p>\n Signage at the Google Midlothian Data Center in Midlothian, Texas, US, on Friday, Nov. 14, 2025.<\/p>\n Jonathan Johnson | Bloomberg | Getty Images<\/p>\n Investors shouldn’t expect Alphabet’s epic spending spree to change course next year.<\/p>\n Finance chief Anat Ashkenazi said in April that 2027 capex is likely to “significantly increase” from the up to $190 billion planned for this year.<\/p>\n Evercore analysts wrote in a note over the weekend that “when the CFO warns about following year capex in the March Quarter, the plans are going to be aggressive.” The Evercore analysts then \u2014 jokingly \u2014 asked if the number could hit “$300B? $350B?!”<\/p>\n Ultimately, they settled on an estimate of $262 billion, and noted that they’re concerned “that capex spend could ramp higher than this.” The consensus estimate for Alphabet’s 2027 capex is about $257 billion, according to FactSet.<\/p>\n \u2014 Jonathan Vanian<\/p>\n YouTube ad revenue growth set to slow as user base expands past 3 billion<\/p>\n Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images<\/p>\n Analysts expect YouTube’s advertising revenue growth to ease up as the video engine reaches greater scale.<\/p>\n The unit should contribute $10.81 billion in revenue, which would imply roughly 10% growth from a year earlier, decelerating from 11% expansion in the first quarter.<\/p>\n In May, at the I\/O developer conference, Google said YouTube had reached 3 billion users, alongside the company’s search engine, Gmail, Chrome and Android. The milestone makes the site an increasingly compelling destination for advertisers. <\/p>\n Meta had 3.56 billion “daily active people” across its apps in the first quarter<\/a>. <\/p>\n Evercore ISI analysts came away with a favorable assessment of YouTube’s stature following a June survey. In a note to clients on Sunday, they pointed to relatively attractive advertising costs and “linear TV leakage.” <\/p>\n \u2014Jordan Novet<\/p>\n Google’s cloud growth is outpacing rivals<\/p>\n The Google Cloud logo is displayed on a high-definition digital monolith at the entrance of the Google pavilion during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on March 5, 2026.<\/p>\n Joan Cros | Nurphoto | Getty Images<\/p>\n Google is trailing Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing, but it’s been growing faster. <\/p>\n Second-quarter revenue in Alphabet’s Google Cloud unit, which includes infrastructure and Google Workspace productivity subscriptions, is expected to show 64% growth from a year earlier to $22.24 billion, according to StreetAccount.<\/p>\n That’s an acceleration from 63% expansion in the first quarter, which topped market leader Amazon Web Services’ 28% growth<\/a>. At Microsoft, revenue from Azure and other cloud services increased 40%<\/a>.<\/p>\n Large companies are running more apps on Google’s cloud, incorporating the company’s AI models, CEO Sundar Pichai said on the last earnings call in April. Additionally, the Gemini Enterprise assistant for corporate workers, which starts at $21 per person per month, is gaining traction, he said.<\/p>\n Demand for Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, is also ramping at AI labs. In April, Google touted a cloud TPU<\/a> for training AI models and one that handles inference jobs.<\/p>\n The $29.5 billion acquisition earlier this year of cloud security company Wiz<\/a> is also boosting cloud growth. Google is seeing so much demand that it inked<\/a> a deal in June with Elon Musk<\/a>‘s SpaceX<\/a>, agreeing to pay $920 million a month for AI compute capacity. <\/p>\n \u2014 Jordan Novet<\/p>\n Wall Street is focused on AI spending<\/p>\n A general view of the Google Midlothian Data Center on Nov. 14, 2025 in Midlothian, Texas.<\/p>\n Ron Jenkins | Getty Images<\/p>\n Alphabet and its hyperscaler peers are spending boatloads of money on massive data center and related computing projects<\/a>, and investors are paying close attention. <\/p>\n That puts a particular focus on Alphabet’s capital expenditures, or capex, which has been skyrocketing in recent quarters. In April, the company raised its 2026 capex guidance<\/a> to between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from $175 billion to $185 billion.<\/p>\n The consensus estimate for Alphabet’s 2026 capex is $187.1 billion, according to FactSet. Among the web giants, Amazon<\/a> is the only one expected to spend more, with analysts projecting capex of $200 billion, in line with the company’s forecast<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u2014 Jonathan Vanian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alphabet execs likely to give Waymo update as robotaxi service aims for international expansion A line of Waymo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,2709,5740,6166,363,364,2337,2339,4562,553,4568,161427,162295,155297,2338,220,5741,111,139,69,250942,145,35811],"class_list":["post-539113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-alphabet-class-a","tag-amazon-com-inc","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-breaking-news-investing","tag-breaking-news-markets","tag-breaking-news-technology","tag-business-news","tag-earnings","tag-first-trust-cloud-computing-etf","tag-global-x-robotics-artificial-intelligence-etf","tag-invesco-qqq-trust","tag-investment-strategy","tag-markets","tag-microsoft-corp","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-openai-forge-global","tag-technology","tag-technology-select-sector-spdr-fund"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/108338182-17846699121784669881-47307787764-1080pnbcnews.jpg\")
<\/p>\n