Alphabet’s capex in 2026 is poised to smash expectations. Broadcom is a huge winner there.

Alphabet released earnings yesterday, and things are looking pretty solid over at the Google parent company. The search giant has been riding high following the widely praised release of Gemini 3 in November, as well as growing enthusiasm around its lucrative tensor processing unit (TPU) semiconductor business. Prior to the earnings report, the stock was up more than 60% in the last 12 months.

📺 YouTube’s Q4 ad revenue rose 9% to $11.4 billion.

☁️ Google Cloud revenue for the fourth quarter was $17.7 billion, rising 48% year over year. That’s an astonishing rate of growth.

🔎 As for the golden goose? Google’s Search business brought in $63.1 billion, up 17%, and more broadly Google’s advertising revenue was $82.3 billion, a 14% increase year over year.

So, Alphabet’s the big winner? Nah, Broadcom is the big winner from Alphabet’s earnings.

The search giant reported full-year capital expenditure to be $91.4 billion, in line with its own expectations.

However, the company’s 2026 capex is expected to be way higher than analysts thought: $175 billion to $185 billion, versus analysts’ $115.6 billion estimate.

Those billions are going somewhere, and that somewhere is often enough Broadcom, the custom chip specialist behind the TPUs that Gemini is trained on.

Alphabet’s Class C shares were up about 2% after the release of earnings, but Broadcom jumped 6% on the print.

The Takeaway

Broadcom has enjoyed a halo effect from Google’s capex plans and the success of its Gemini 3 model over the past year.

The custom chip designer had tumbled after its most recent earnings report, though, with some analysts attributing the decline to the dearth of new customer announcements. But who needs new customers when your current ones are opening their wallets this much?!?