Bloomberg Surveillance · Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Alphabet reported an impressive 82% growth in its Cloud business, reaching $100 billion. However, concerns were raised about the backlog number for cloud services being lower than expected compared to Microsoft's, especially given Google Cloud's major customer, Anthropic. Additionally, the core search business was noted as being slightly below expectations, leading to questions about its future performance in the face of AI chatbot usage.
“It's one hundred billion in our rundread.”
“But backlog is probably where I would say the visper number was higher simply because when I look at Microsoft's backlog number, it's higher than alphabets.”
“And so I guess the other way of looking at it is that there's a concern out there that the core search business gets more impacted by the behavior of using a chatbot in lieu of the search engine, and so it's a slight miss, right, that's not evidence of that.”