Google: Google data center initiatives postponed, but increases in AI compute expenditure made

Alphabet reported quarterly sales of $74.6 billion, an increase of 7% from the same period last year.  Profits increased by 15% to $18.4 billion. While advertising sales drove the majority of the company's development, cloud sales increased by 28 % to $8 billion. Google Cloud reported its second-ever profit of $395 million.

The company's capital expenditures totaled $6.89 billion in the most recent quarter. As a result of a decline in office build-out and delays in specific data center construction projects, the actual capex expenditure was significantly less than the $7.9bn predicted by analysts.

Current CFO Ruth Porat, who is slated to become the company’s president and chief investment officer, anticipates that "levels of investment in our technical infrastructure will increase through the second half of 2023 and continue to grow in 2024, both to catch up with the slower start and to support the opportunities we see in AI across Alphabet, including investments in GPUs and proprietary TPUs as well as data center capacity."