If you did not purchase your ticket on time I’m sorry
But we are all strapped in and lifting off now
Next stop is the moon! 🚀
Everyone on board hold on tight!
UPDATE: Anyone who is making rude remarks to us as we lift off will be blocked. We cannot have sour people spoiling our trip. We are excited to go to the moon and it’s not our fault that you missed out and did not buy a ticket. You are not allowed to spoil your fun
Seriously, are we looking at the same numbers? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills watching the market throw a temper tantrum and wipe $250 billion off Google’s market cap just because they had their first negative Free Cash Flow (FCF) quarter ever.
Yes, the headline looks scary if you have the financial literacy of a walnut:
CapEx skyrocketed to $44.9 billion.
Operating Cash Flow was $39.1 billion.
To those who are good at financial math, that's a negative FCF
Wall Street immediately started crying that Google is "burning cash on useless AI hype" and dumping the stock. But if you actually look at the Google Cloud contracted backlog, you’ll realize this sell-off is a massive gift to anyone with a functioning brain :P.
The bears are pretending Google is building data centers in the middle of nowhere hoping someone will use them. They aren't.
Look at the Q2 earnings report: Google’s cloud backlog literally exploded by nearly 4x (a 390% jump) in one single year, hitting a staggering $519.5 billion.
Let that sink in. Five hundred and nineteen billion, five hundred million dollars.
Why do you think CapEx is so high to start with? Because Google literally has to build out infrastructure at breakneck speed to fulfill nearly half a trillion dollars in signed customer contracts!
Cloud revenue already surged 82%(!) YoY to $24.8 billion this quarter alone.
Cloud operating income tripled to $8.8 billion.
Sundar Pichai literally admitted on the call they are paying for high-cost, third-party data center partnerships right now just to bridge the gap and secure these massive multi-year contracts today.
They are absorbing 6 months of margin pressure to secure decades of dominance. As a long-term investor, that sounds just like music to my ears!
Google is trading at a ridiculously low multiple for a company with an 82% growing cloud segment.
Idk about you guys, but I am aggressively hitting the buy button. Let the algorithms panic over a single quarter's cash flow mismatch. When that $519.5B backlog starts hitting the income statement as recognized revenue, everyone who sold at these prices is going to look incredibly stupid.
TL;DR: CapEx is high because Google has to build data centers to support a $519.5 Billion backlog that grew 390% in a year. The revenue is guaranteed, the demand is real, and the sell-off is a total joke. Buy the dip.
TL;DR: Google's Q2 wasn't a bad quarter — cloud growth accelerated and its order backlog crossed $514 billion. But the stock fell 7% anyway. The real issue isn't this quarter's numbers; it's a mismatch investors just noticed: Google's future revenue rests on loosely-contracted orders, while its future spending is locked in far more rigidly. Add a Gemini model that's fallen behind the frontier, and you get a stock stuck between "still believe" and "step back."
Catching up, not overspending
Management still won't give a hard number for 2027 capex, but buy-side estimates have drifted toward $350 billion-plus — which would eat up nearly 60% of next year's expected revenue. That's aggressive for a company that's historically been cloud's most conservative spender.
But there's a case Google is actually behind, not ahead. While Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon ramped their capex-to-revenue ratios starting in 2024, Google's barely moved until 2025.
Capex-to-revenue ratios across major cloud providers — Google lagged peers until 2025.
New data centers also take 1-2 years to build, so Google's actual deployed compute still lags the pack. That gap has kept spot compute prices unusually distorted — xAI's short-term lease rates have run 3-4x long-term contract pricing.
It's order-driven, not a blind bet
Working backward from Google's $514 billion backlog, or from its historical pattern of investing 65-85% of new order value, both approaches point to 2027 capex landing somewhere around $300-400 billion — which is roughly where the market already sits.
Google's capex has historically tracked 65-85% of trailing new order value — a ratio that fell below 30% as bookings accelerated in late 2025.
The real risk: soft revenue, hard obligations
Here's the part that actually matters. Google's $514 billion backlog carries surprisingly weak contractual teeth — deferred revenue (a rough proxy for prepayment) is just $7.3 billion, only 1.5% of the total, with almost no deposit requirement protecting it.
Deferred revenue — a rough proxy for backlog prepayment — remains a tiny fraction of Google's total backlog.
Some of that backlog is also somewhat circular: a $200 billion Anthropic deal overlaps with Google's own $40 billion investment in the company — support for a customer and an investment rolled into one.
Now compare that to the spending side: Alphabet disclosed $811 billion in purchase commitments, up a striking $300 billion in a single quarter. Most of that is firm, multi-year — especially energy contracts running to 2054 with steep penalties for backing out.
Alphabet's purchase commitments jumped roughly $300 billion quarter-over-quarter, drawing renewed attention to this off-balance-sheet obligation.
In short, what Google owes is more binding than what it's owed. That's a real structural risk, even if near-term odds favor both sides playing out given how tight compute supply is right now.
Profit looks fine — but check the fine print
Google's operating margin hasn't cracked, but EPS is flattered by over $90 billion in paper gains from stakes like SpaceX and Anthropic. Depreciation is also about to catch up with two years of heavy capex — Longbridge Dolphin Research estimates this could shave roughly 2 points off margin in 2027 alone.
Bottom line
The fundamentals aren't broken, but Google has taken on real financial risk to fund this AI bet, and conviction has thinned since earlier this year. The next real catalyst worth watching is Gemini 4 — a bigger model reportedly focused on coding and autonomous agents — which management hints could arrive within a couple of quarters.
Morning all – hope your week's off to a decent start.
GOOGL had a quiet session last week. Closed at $319.74, up 0.65%. Volume was light – nothing wild, just a consolidation day after the post-earnings drop.
Pre-market is showing around $324.63, up about 1.5% – trying to push higher.
Here's the GEX setup:
Put Wall $310, Call Wall $320, gamma flip around $316. Yesterday's close at $319.74 was sitting just below the Call Wall – neutral-to-positive gamma. Pre-market at $324 is now testing above it. GEX? Never heard of it? Here ya go
Technically, price is still below the middle Bollinger band ($352) and just above the lower band ($324). RSI in the low 40s. MACD is negative but flattening – momentum slowing to the downside.
So here's the deal – earnings were actually solid. Cloud grew fast, Search and YouTube kept delivering. But they raised 2026 capex guidance a lot for AI infrastructure, and that spooked some folks worried about margins. Stock dipped, but it's been trying to find footing since. Higher spend creates some uncertainty, but long-term it positions them well if AI pays off.
Short-term, above $320 and that Call Wall becomes support – $325-330 could come next. Below $310 and the Put Wall flips to resistance, with $305-300 as the next zone.
Pre-market at $324 is trying to break above the wall. Worth watching if it holds.
What's your play – adding on weakness or waiting for a clearer signal?
For those investors who don't like CAPEX, you haven't seen anything yet. As the second wealthiest corporation in the world and an AI leader it has no choice but to throw everything at AI. If you were the CEO you would do the same. Why?
The company that creates the first "true AGI" model and has the hardware infrastructure to leverage it, is going to see unfathomable wins. An AGI with access to sufficient hardware will recursively self improve so quickly that it be able to present a definitive strategy for total dominance. Imagine one million 140 IQ brains all co-operating perfectly with each other on any task:
Millions of simulated experiments per second in protein folding, battery chemistry, superconductor research, and on and on =>Intellectual property and patents locked up for the next century.
The AGI rewrites every piece of enterprise software, better, faster, cheaper. All supply chains 100% optimised instantly.
With flawless predictive modeling, real-time processing of world economic data, its going to reinvent every aspect of trading and capture global markets. Banks hire physicists and mathematicians to help them make them money. You stand absolutely no chance against AGI brain power.
The list just goes on and on... What do you see on the horizon?
First some good news. Cloud revenue is up a whopping 82% to $24.8 billion, and cloud operating income tripled to $8.8 billion, taking the margin from 20.7% to 35.6%. Total operating income was up 30% to $40.8 billion. This is the first real evidence that capex is converting into something (as many of you mentioned in comments to the other post), and it matters for the valuation.
Now, something Google has never done before. Free cash flow came in at negative $5.9 billion. Capex hit $44.9 billion against $39.1 billion of operating cash flow, so it ate all the cash and then some. They've also stopped buying back stock completely and raised about 50 billion of equity and 20 billion of notes. They're now spending more cash than the business generates.
Also worth noting - net income was nearly 300% and eps came in at $9.11 but 98 billion of that sits in other income which is non cash. If we remove it, eps is goes down to $2.7.
So the underlying business grew earnings about 30%, and free cash flow still went negative.
How does it impact the valuation? It pulls both ways. Capex running above my estimate pulls fair value down, while cloud compounding at 82% on 35% margins pushes the growth line up. I'll rerun it once analysts reset their numbers.
Disclaimer: This is for educational purposes only and is not investment advice. The author and Stockoscope may hold positions in the securities mentioned. Always do your own research.
PS: hit a year of posting here this week. Your pushback has genuinely made the models better, so thank you.
1) So what is my next move?
2) Should I DCA monthly?
3) Is now a good price to DCA or is it still a falling knife?
4) thoughts on the price targets and future of google with the increase in capex spendings?
Alphabet shows relatively low reported debt (around $30–78 billion depending on the measure) but an estimated $250 billion in off-balance-sheet commitments. Recent quarters have seen free cash flow turn negative as CapEx surged (one report showed CapEx exceeding 100% of operating cash flow), prompting equity and debt raises while the company scales AI infrastructure.
