Alphabet surpasses $3 trillion

Alphabet, Google's parent company, has announced its first-ever dividend and a $107 billion stock buyback, leading to a nearly 16% stock increase.

This comes as the company invests heavily in data centres to enhance its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
Its tech rival, Meta Platforms, also recently introduced its first dividend, boosting its market value by $196 billion.

Despite this, Amazon remains the only big tech company not offering a dividend.

Alphabet's sales, profit, and advertising for the quarter exceeded expectations, with CEO Sundar Pichai attributing this success to Google's AI offerings.

The company's first-quarter revenue saw a significant increase due to high demand for its cloud services, which are essential for AI adoption and steady advertising spending. This was reflected in Google's advertising growth of 13% to $US61.7 billion.

Google Cloud revenue also rose by 28% in the first quarter, driven by a surge in generative AI tools. These tools, which rely on Google Cloud services, are popular with startups due to their affordability and easy integration.

The recent announcement by Alphabet about offering dividends and a stock buyback highlights the growing significance of artificial intelligence (AI) for big tech companies.

- CyberBeat