Yahoo Finance

Philipp Schindler

Thanks, Sundar, and hello, everyone. I'll quickly cover performance for the quarter and then frame the rest of my remarks around the progress we are delivering across search ads, YouTube and partnerships. Google services revenues were $77 billion for the quarter, up 10% year-on-year, driven by strong growth in Search and YouTube, partially offset by a year-on-year decline in network revenues.
To add some further color to the performance. The 10% increase in search and other revenues was led by financial services, primarily due to strength in insurance followed by retail. YouTube saw a similar performance across verticals. It's 10% growth in advertising revenues was driven by direct response followed by brand.
So let's start with search, where we've seen robust growth in revenues. All around the world, over 2 billion people use search every day to find information, compare products or shop. And there are more than 5 trillion searches on Google annually. We've continued our efforts to help more people ask entirely new questions, bringing more opportunities for businesses to connect with consumers. And as we've mentioned before, with the launch of AI overviews, the volume of commercial quarries has increased.
Q1 marked our largest expansion to date for AI overviews, both in terms of launching to new users and providing responses for more questions. The feature is now available in more than 15 languages across 140 countries. For overviews, overall, we continue to see monetization at approximately the same rate, which gives us a strong base in which we can innovate even more.
Turning to visual quarries. On the last earnings call, I mentioned the success we're seeing with lens, where shoppers use their camera or images to quickly find information in ways they couldn't before. In Q1, the number of people shopping on lens grew by over 10%, and the majority of lens quarries are incremental. Sundar mentioned the significant growth we're also seeing with Circle to search as multi-modality continues to drive quarries across search.
Moving to ads. More businesses, big and small, are adopting AI part campaigns, and the deployment of AI across our ads business is driving results for our customers and for our business. Throughout 2024, we launched several features that leverage LLM to enhance advertiser value, and we're seeing this work pay off. The combination of these launches now allows us to match ads to more relevant search queries. And this helps advertisers reach customers and searches where we would not previously have shown their ads.
Focusing on our customers, we continue to solve advertisers' pain points and find opportunities to help them create distribute and measure more performant ads infusing AI at every step of the marketing process. On Audience Insights, we released new asset audience recommendations, which tell businesses the themes that resonate most with their top audiences.
On creative, advertisers can now generate a broader variety of lifestyle imagery customized to their business to better engage their customers and use them across PMAX, dimension, display and app campaigns. Additionally, in PMAX, advertisers can automatically source images from their landing pages and crop them, increasing the variety of their assets.
On media buying, advertisers continue to see how AI-powered campaigns help them find new customers. In demand gen, advertisers can more precisely manage ad placements across YouTube Gmail, Discover and Google display network globally and understand which assets work best at a channel level.
Thanks to dozens of AI part improvements launched in 2024, businesses using demand gen now see an average 26% year-on-year increase in conversions per dollar spend for gold-like purchases and leads. And when using demand gen with product feed, on average, they see more than double the conversion per dollar spent year-over-year.
As an example, Royal Canin combined demand gen and PMAX campaigns to find more customers for its cat and dog food products. The integration resulted in a 2.7 times higher conversion rate, a 70% lower cost per acquisition for purchases and increase the value per user by 8%.
Turning to YouTube, where we saw strong growth in revenues across ads and subscriptions. This week, we're celebrating YouTube's 20th anniversary. We are proud of its leadership as a streaming destination where people come to watch everything they love from live sports and greater produced content to shorts and podcasts. Creators are what drives viewership and on average, they upload 20 million videos a day to YouTube. Our biggest creators generate a level of fandom and viewer engagement around large cultural moments on YouTube that brands can't find anywhere else.
During March Madness, brands aligned not only with clips and highlights from the game, but also with the creators who drive basketball culture like Jasser and the Ringers J. Kileman. In Q1, the growth of our reservation-based ads business more than doubled year-over-year. Brands and creators continue to use the opportunities that collaborations and partnerships offer.
Toyota work with Zach King, the King of short magical videos with over 42 million followers to take over his channel. The creator takeover and accompanying Creator ad lifted to Eros brand awareness by 25% compared to a control group and 9% compared to the Toyota brand ad.
Looking at shorts, engaged views grew by over 20% in the first quarter. We continue to be pleased with the progress we're making globally in shorts monetization relative to in-stream viewing and are particularly encouraged by the trend in the US.
As always, I'll wrap up with the strong momentum we're seeing in partnerships where customers increasingly recognize the strength and breadth of what Google has to offer. For instance, roadblocks is partnering Google Ad Manager to bring immersive ads to gamers.
Gen Z gamers are roadblocks biggest users and thanks to our partnership, advertisers will be able to reach this audience with ads that blend seamlessly into the gaming experience. We also launched a YouTube shorts effect to help people release iconic roadblocks heads and inspire fans to create content at scale.
In closing, I'd like to thank Google everywhere for their contributions and commitment to our success and to our customers and partners for their continued trust.
Anat, over to you.

Anat Ashkenazi

Thank you, Philipp. My comments will focus on year-over-year comparisons for the first quarter, unless I state otherwise. I will start with results at the Alphabet level and will then cover our segment results. I'll end with some commentary on our outlook for the second quarter and 2025.
We had another strong quarter in Q1, consolidated revenues of $90.2 billion, increased by 12% or 14% in constant currency. Search and YouTube advertising, subscription platforms and devices and Google Cloud each had double-digit revenue growth this quarter, reflecting strong momentum across the business. Total cost of revenue was $36.4 billion, up 8%.
Tech was $13.7 billion, up 6%. We continue to see a revenue mix shift with Google Search growth at double-digit levels while network revenues, which have much higher tax rate declined. Other cost of revenue was $22.6 billion, up 9%, with the increase primarily driven by content acquisition costs largely for YouTube, followed by depreciation and other technical infrastructure operations costs.
Total operating expenses increased 9% to $23.3 billion. R&D investments increased by 14%, primarily driven by increases in compensation and depreciation expenses. Sales and marketing expenses decreased 4%, primarily reflecting a decline in compensation expenses. G&A expenses increased by 17%, reflecting the impact of charges for legal and other matters.
Operating income increased 20% this quarter to $31 billion, and operating margin increased to 33.9%, representing 2.3 points of margin expansion. Operating margin benefited from healthy revenue growth, a moderated pace of compensation growth and a favorable mix shift towards lower tech advertising revenues, partially offset by year-on-year increase in depreciation expenses of just over $1 billion.
Other income and expenses was $11.2 billion, primarily due to unrealized gain on our nonmarketable equity securities related to our investment in a private company, which we noted in our 10-K is a subsequent event. Net income increased 46% to $34.5 billion and earnings per share increased 49% to $2.81. We delivered free cash flow of $19 billion in the first quarter and $74.9 billion for the trailing 12 months. We ended the quarter with $95 billion in cash and marketable securities.
Turning to segment results. Google Services revenues increased 10% to $77.3 billion, reflecting strength in Google Search and YouTube advertising as subscription. Google Search and other advertising revenues increased by 10% to $50.7 billion. The robust performance of search was once again broad-based across verticals led by financial services due primarily to strength in insurance followed by retail.
YouTube advertising revenues increased 10% to $8.9 billion, driven by direct response advertising followed by brand. Network advertising of $7.3 billion were down 2%. Subscription platforms and device revenues increased 19% to $10.4 billion, primarily reflected growth in subscription revenues. This growth was primarily driven by YouTube subscription offerings followed by Google One, with growth in the number of subscribers being the biggest driver of revenue growth. Google Services operating income increased 17% to $32.7 billion and operating margin increased from 39.6% to 42.3%.
Turning to the Google Cloud segment, which continued to deliver very strong results this quarter. Revenue increased by 28% to $12.3 billion in the first quarter reflecting growth in GCP across core and AI products at a rate that was much higher than cloud's overall revenue growth rate. Growth in Google Workspace was primarily driven by an increase in average revenue per seat. Google Cloud operating income increased to $2.2 billion and operating margin increased from 9.4% to 17.8%.
As we scale our fleet, we continue to focus on driving improvements in productivity, efficiency and utilization to offset the growth in expenses, particularly from higher depreciation. As to other bets, for the first quarter, revenues were $450 million, and operating loss was $1.2 billion. The year-on-year decline in revenue and increase in operating loss primarily reflects the milestone payment received in the first quarter of 2024 for one of our other bets.
With respect to CapEx, our reported CapEx in the first quarter was $17.2 billion, primarily reflecting investment in our technical infrastructure with the largest component being investment in servers, followed by data centers to support the growth of our business across Google Services, Google Cloud and Google DeepMind.
In Q1, we returned value to shareholders in the form of $15.1 billion in share repurchases and $2.4 billion in dividend payments. As we announced today, our Board of Directors declared a 5% increase in our quarterly dividend and also approved and used $70 billion share repurchase authorization.
Turning to our outlook. I would like to provide some commentary on several factors that will impact our business performance in the second quarter and the remainder of 2025. First, in terms of revenue, I'll highlight a couple of items that we mentioned last quarter that will have an impact on second quarter and 2025 revenue.
First, in Google services, advertising revenue in 2025 will be impacted by lapping the strength we experienced in the financial service vertical throughout 2024. Second, in cloud, we're in a tight demand supply environment and given that revenues are correlated with the timing of deployment of new capacity, we could see variability in cloud revenue growth rates depending on capacity deployment each quarter. We expect relatively higher capacity deployment towards the end of 2025.
Moving to investments, starting with our expectation for CapEx for the full year 2025. We still expect to invest approximately $75 billion in CapEx this year. The expected CapEx investment level may fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter due to the impact of changes in the timing of deliveries and construction schedules.
In terms of expenses. First, as I mentioned on our previous earnings call, the significant increase in our investments in CapEx over the past few years will continue to put pressure on the P&L, primarily in the form of higher depreciation. In the first quarter, we saw 31% year-on-year growth in depreciation from the increase in technical infrastructure assets placed in service. Given the increase in CapEx investments over the past few years, we expect the growth rate in depreciation to accelerate throughout 2025.
Second, as we've previously said, we expect some head count growth in 2025 in key investment area. As we've disclosed previously, due to a shift in the timing of our annual employee stock-based compensation awards begin in 2023. Our first quarter stock-based comp expenses is relatively lower compared to the remaining quarters of the year.
In conclusion, as you heard from Sundar and Philipp, we're pleased with the progress we're making across the organization, the results for the quarter and the opportunities ahead. Our success as a company is grounded in our experience driving advancements in deep computer science that enables us to create innovative new products and services for users, businesses and partners around the world. We have a strong track record of incubating and then building these offerings into new profitable businesses for Alphabet.
As we announced last quarter, YouTube and cloud exited 2024 at a combined annual run rate of $110 billion. And as you heard from Sundar earlier, Waymo has continued to progress in building on its impressive technological achievements to scale rapidly and develop a sustainable business model.
Thank you.
Sundar, Philipp and I will now take your questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley.

Brian Nowak

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I have two. The first one on sort of the macro advertising backdrop, maybe -- I know it's April 24, and you called out some factors that you're kind of thinking about the second quarter. Any other factors you're seeing in advertising verticals or regions or categories that could be showing any signs of weakness quarter-to-date, we should think through any other changes from typical seasonality in 2Q '25 versus prior quarters?
Then the second one, on Philipp, I think I heard you mentioned how the volume of commercial queries has increased. Maybe can you just walk us through which of the products are driving that increase in commercial queries. And as you sort of think about the pipeline of search products, are there any others that you're particularly excited about to kind of continue to drive further commercial query growth throughout '25, '26? Thanks.

Philipp Schindler

So let me take the first one as well. We saw broad-based strength across ad verticals in Q1, and we saw it give you a bit of vertical color here, search was led again, by finance, due primarily to ongoing strength in the insurance, retail, health care and travel. We're actually also sizable contributors here to growth.
With regard to Q2, we're only a few weeks in, so it's really too early to comment. I mean we're obviously not immune to the macro environment. We wouldn't want to speculate about potential impacts beyond noting that the changes to the de minimis exemption will obviously cause a slight headwind to our ads business in 2025, primarily from APAC-based retailers.
And maybe to zoom out, I would say we have a lot of experience in managing through uncertain times, and we focus on helping our customers by providing deep insights into changing consumer behavior that is relevant to their business. Examples are auction dynamics, quarry trend insights on topics like replacement purchases and so on. So we have a lot of experience in this area.
On the commercial quarry side, look, AI overviews continue to drive higher satisfaction and search usage. And as I noticed Q1 was really our largest expansion to date for AI overviews, both in terms of launching to new users and providing responses for more questions. And that's really the core already of the answer. AI Overviews sits at the center of your question here. And when it comes to other products, look, I don't want to speculate on this, but we're happy with what we're seeing here in AI Overviews, and I'm confident we can expand this to more products over time.

Operator

Doug Anmuth, JPMorgan.

Doug Smith

Thanks for taking the questions. Phil, maybe just to go back to AI Overviews for a moment. Can you just tell us how we should think about the $1.5 billion AI Overviews users just in terms of breadth of rollout? And I know you're saying monetization at approximately the same rate. But what does that mean in terms of click-through rates and conversion?
And then Anat, just curious if there have been any changes to Google's approach to durably reengineering the cost base since you've joined? And if macro weakens, and you see more of a slowdown, would you expect to find additional opportunities to cut back more on costs?

Philipp Schindler

Yes. Look, on the ads, in AI Overviews, last -- late last year, actually, we launched them within the overviews on mobile in the US. And this builds on our previous rollout of ads above and below. So this was a change that we have. But as I talked about it before, overall, we see the monetization at approximately the same rate, which gives us a strong base on which we can innovate even more. So I'm very happy with this. I don't think this is the moment to go into the details of clicks rates and conversion and so on. But overall, we're happy with what we're seeing.

Anat Ashkenazi

And to your question on our approach to productivity and efficiency, it hasn't really changed. I've mentioned my approach and our approach as a company on -- at the end of 2024. And we're still focused on driving efficiency and productivity throughout the organization, both in our operating expenses and in our CapEx. I mentioned some of these on my -- during my prepared remarks.
But certainly, this helps us as we think about the investments we need to make in innovation to drive long-term sustainable growth profile for the company, we're able to repurpose some of these efficiencies into these investments as well as, as you think about the increase in CapEx we've seen over the past several years and what we're investing this year, this will put additional pressure on the income statement in the form of depreciation.
So we're working hard to try and offset some of the headwinds as well as within the CapEx investments themselves, $75 billion, we're looking at how do we make sure every dollar is used efficiently. We have a highly rigorous process, to determine the demand behind it and then the allocation of the compute associate with our technical infrastructure investments, ensuring that we're utilizing that appropriately and that we're highly efficient with everything we're doing.
You've seen some of the announcement and some of the changes but we're focusing on continuing to moderate the pace of compensation growth, looking at our real estate footprint and again, the build-out and utilization of our technical infrastructure across the business.

Doug Smith

Great. Thank you, Both.

Operator

Eric Sheridan,Goldman Sachs.

Eric Sheridan

Thank you for taking the questions. First, maybe for Sundar. When you look across the consumer AI landscape today, how are you thinking about continuing to drive differentiation for Gemini as a platform through the lens of usage, utility or putting product innovation at the forefront of driving consumer habits.
And then the second one, maybe for Anat, if the macro environment were to change and become more downwardly volatile, how should investors think about the investments that are must make this year almost fixed in nature versus where there might be more flexibility to alter the investment priorities of the company if the macro environment were to worsen? Thank you so much.

Sundar Pichai

Thanks, Eric. Obviously, it's an exciting moment on the AI front. I think the foundation for everything is obviously the Frontier model progress we are seeing and particularly with 2.5 pro and flash. I think we're well positioned. We are seeing tremendous reception from developers, enterprises and consumers too.
And obviously, we are delivering consumer AI experiences across our product portfolio, including the primary way people experience it is obviously in search with AI Overviews and very early days with AI mode, but that will be a consumer AI forward experience. And we're already seeing very positive feedback. Queries are -- people are typing in roughly 2 times longer queries compared to a traditional search.
So there's a lot of excitement there. And in the Gemini app, which you asked about, we've really seen increased momentum, particularly over the last few weeks as we've rolled out just the newer models, but we are seeing users are really responding well to all the innovation Gemini Live which is based on Project Astra has been very well received, deep research.
I think based on 2.5 Pro is Sota and that's been well received in Canvas, we've had a lot of traction as well. And so we are definitely investing more. We have recently organized ourselves better to capitalize on this momentum, and I'm excited about our road map there.

Anat Ashkenazi

And on the investments this year and overall, should there be any macroeconomic changes as I said, we're still planning to invest approximately $75 billion in CapEx this year. we do see a tremendous opportunity ahead of us across the organization, whether it's to support Google services, Google Cloud and Google DeepMin.
Recall stated on the Q4 call that we exited the year in cloud specifically with more customer demand than we had capacity. And that was the case this quarter as well. So we want to make sure we ramp up to support customer needs and customer demands.
Having said that, we're investing in long term, and we're investing in innovation. That's the essence of our business. and we want to do it in a responsible fashion. So you've seen us over the past couple of years, and we're continuing to do this, and you're seeing this in our results, drive efficiency and productivity throughout the business.
And we've announced things such as consolidation of teams, which helps not just with cost, but with velocity and speed. We're able to get things to market faster. So that's one of the areas we're focused on. You heard from Sundar in the last couple of calls and just a rapid pace of innovation we're bringing to the marketplace.
So the way we're doing this across the business to drive productivity and efficiency should help us have a more resilient organization irrespective of macroeconomic condition. But certainly, we don't ignore that. We always look at what's happening outside the organization as well as inside but invest appropriately to drive both the short-term growth as well as the long-term growth.

Eric Sheridan

Thank you.

Operator

Ross Sandler, Barclays.

Ross Sandler

Great, thanks. One for Sundar, one for Philipp. Sundar, it was disclosed this week in the trial that's going on that Gemini has 35 million DAUs. And just curious, that number obviously trails ChatGPT by a pretty wide margin. Could you talk about the strategy to get that DAU figure much higher that you guys are deploying?
And then Philipp, just curious to hear what you're seeing on the brand advertising side at YouTube in 1Q and into early 2Q. Are brands holding up relatively well, like direct response? Or are they starting to react to some of these macro jitters that we're experiencing? Any thoughts there? Thank you very much.

Sundar Pichai

Thanks, Ross. I think I touched upon this to Eric's question as well, but we are definitely I think there's been a lot of momentum in terms of product features we've been introducing, and we are definitely seeing reception, including increased adoption and usage based on those features. So I think we are in a positive cycle. The recent advances on the model frontier. By many metrics, I think we have the best model out there now. And I think that's going to drive increased adoption as well.
And again, I would reiterate, people are using -- obviously, we have 1.5 billion users through AI Overviews interacting with AI in a deep way in a very way. Obviously, we are innovating with AI mode. And we have a very exciting road map ahead with the Gemini app as well. So across the board, super excited about what's ahead.

Philipp Schindler

And on your brand question, brand and, by the way, also Direct Response had a very solid growth brand advertisers really enjoyed culture moments we had like Cochela, for example, or March Madness. We had strong contributions overall from the finance and retail verticals in Q1 on the site as well.
The operating metrics for YouTube were strong in Q1. Watch time growth remains robust, particularly in key monetization opportunity areas such as shorts and living room. It's also, by the way, nice to see the strong position of our creators who obviously benefit from the brand piece, which gives us a lot of confidence when we look at it more closely. And on the Q2 side, I think I mentioned it's too early to really comment on that.

Operator

Mark Shmulik from Bernstein.

Mark Shmulik

Great. Thanks for digging my questions. Sundar, I appreciate the color on Gemini deployment across kind of the 15 products with 0.5 billion users or more. It would be great to hear more about where you're seeing the most usage and deployment of Gen AI internally at Google, perhaps whether the capabilities are they in a place today in terms of either supplementing or augmenting the workforce.
And then just to build on that earlier AI mode type questions. Appreciate AI mode has 2 times longer queries in traditional search. But any color you can share perhaps on how AI mode behavior differs from how consumers are using the Gemini app?

Sundar Pichai

Look, internally, I mean this has been an extraordinary amount of focus and excitement both because I think we are -- the early use cases have been transformative in nature and I think there's still feels like early days and long ways to go. Obviously, I had mentioned a few months ago in terms of how we are using AI for coding. We're continuing to make a lot of progress there in terms of people using coding additions. I think the last time I had said the number was like 25% of code that's checked in. It involves people accepting AI suggested solutions. That number is well over 30% now.
But more importantly, we have deployed more deeper flows and particularly with the newer models, I think we are working on early agent workflows and how we can get those coding experiences to be much deeper. We are deploying it across all parts of the company. Our customer service teams are deeply leading the way there. We've both dramatically enhanced our user experience as well as made it much more efficient to do so, and we are actually bringing all our learnings and expertise in our solutions through cloud to our other customers.
But beyond that, all the way from the finance team preparing for this earnings call, to everything. It's deeply embedded in everything we do. But I still see it as early days and there's going to be a lot more to do. On AI mode, look, I think we are just leaning in on the early positive feedback. Well, as we scaled up AI overviews. It's been one of our most positive launches. And -- but it's been clear people have wanted even more of it.
And so with AI mode, we are bringing the -- our state-of-the-art Germany models right into search. And I mentioned people typing in longer queries. There's a lot more complex nuance questions, people are following through more. People are appreciating the clean design, the fast response time and the fact that they can kind of be much more open-ended can undertake more complicated tasks, product comparisons, for example, has been a positive one. exploring how to is planning a trip.
So those are the kinds of early feedback we are seeing. And I think we are obviously really focused on improving the product across all of AI mode, AI Overviews in the Gemini app, and we are seeing positive user traction as well.

Operator

Mark Mahaney, Evercore.

Mark Mahaney

Okay, thanks. One for Anat and one for Sundar. Anat, getting back to a question I think that Doug was asking earlier. You just put up record high or multiyear record high margins for both Google services and for Google Cloud, you talk, though, about depreciation expenses accelerating rapidly throughout the year because of all the investments you've already -- you worn people about.
Back in the September quarter, you seem relatively confident that you had enough levers to kind of offset kind of rising infrastructure costs that still your 6 months later? Or is that still your view that you've got enough levers that even with the rising infrastructure costs, you can enough in there to kind of counterbalance that?
And then just briefly on Waymo, that continues to rise aggressively the numbers Sundar. The long-term business model for Waymo. Is there a reason to make a decision on that soon? Or have you already made the decision of whether this is a long-term licensing model or you really want to run this as a stand-alone ridesharing delivery in autonomous vehicle business? Thank you very much.

Anat Ashkenazi

On your first question on profitability and what levers do we have? And do we still have levers to pull. First, I think every organization can always push a little further I don't view productivity goals or efficiency as an episodic kind of project-based effort, but rather a continuous effort that when you get to a certain place you push a little further.
Having said that, we do have significant investments we're making across the organization, and we have been making them for the past several quarters. And we've been able to do it because we were able to find efficiency to fund those investments across the organization. Those are for products and services are going to drive long-term growth for the company.
So while we're trying to offset as much of the headwind associated with the increase in infrastructure costs. It will become more difficult. As I said, the depreciation will accelerate. We had about a 31% year-over-year growth in depreciation this quarter and it will be higher as we go throughout the year.
So think about that kind of as a headwind that we have to manage against but we're continuing with pushing across the organization, leveraging Sundar mentioned the use of AI and kind of an AI first Google across several of our functions to help us manage a larger scope of work using our AI, AI agents and AI tools.
As Sundar mentioned, we did deleverage it in preparation for the earnings call and leveraging across several functions. So there are opportunities, but there are also great opportunities for investment, and we want to make sure that we make room for to make these investments to drive long-term growth and ensure we have a very resilient long-term growth profile for the company.

Sundar Pichai

And Mark, thanks. I think this is probably the first question I've got on an earnings call on Waymo. So thank you, and I think it's a sign of its progress. Look, the thing that excites me is I think we've been laser focused and will continue to be on building the world's best driver. And I think doing that well really gives you a variety of optionality in business models across geographies, et cetera.
It'll also require a successful ecosystem of partners, and we can't possibly do it all ourselves. And so I'm excited about the progress the teams have made through a variety of partnerships, obviously, a highlight of it is a partnership with Uber. We are very pleased with what we are already seeing in Austin in terms of either satisfaction. We look forward to offering the first paid rights in Atlanta, Uber later this year.
But we are also building up a network of partners, for example, for maintaining fleets of vehicles and doing all the operations related to that with the recently announced partnership with Move in Phoenix and Miami. Obviously, partnerships with OEMs, there are future optionality around personal ownership as well.
So we are widely exploring and -- but at the same time, clearly staying focused on making progress both in terms of safety, the driver experience and progress on the business model and operationally scaling it up.

Mark Mahaney

Thank you very much.

Operator

Ken Gawrelski, Wells Fargo.

Ken Gawrelski

Thank you. Two, if I may, please. First, on AI-powered search. You have a number of AI-powered search interfaces, including three most prominently, AI Overviews, AI mode and Gemini. In the future, should we think of these as distinct experiences that will be long-lasting or more experimental now and will -- and Google will eventually focus on one approach going forward?
And the second one is more on the financial side you continue to experience very healthy gross margin expansion. We see the TAC, sure, but you -- Anat, you also talked about the offsetting depreciation expense. Could you talk about beyond those two buckets where you're seeing the real savings on the COGS line and driving that gross margin expansion? And maybe even how we should be thinking about that going forward?

Sundar Pichai

Okay. Now maybe on AI-powered search and how do we see our consumer experience. Look, I do think search and Gemini obviously, will be two distinct efforts, right? I think there are obviously some areas of overlap, but they're also like export very, very different use cases. And so for example, in Gemini, we see people iteratively coding and going much deeper on a coding workflow as an example. So I think both will be around.
Within search, I would think of AI Overviews is scaling up and working for our entire user base, but an AI mode is the tip of the tree for us pushing forward on an AI forward experience. There will be things which we discovered there, which will make sense in the context of AI Overviews. So I think will flow through to our user base. You almost want to think of what are the most advanced 1 million people using search for most advanced 10 million people and then how do 1.5 billion people use search for.
And we want to innovate. And so I think this allows us to do that. But the true not through all of this is user feedback, user satisfaction, user experience. And so that will determine where this all works out in the future.

Anat Ashkenazi

And to your question on gross margin, a couple of trends to highlight there. And I've mentioned this in the prepared remarks, you've seen improvement in tech that's really driven by the change in revenue mix with a continued search growth and the network revenue declines. Network revenue has a much higher attach rate. So that mix is helping us from a gross margin perspective. So think about that as well.
Now we do have depreciation for technical infrastructure hits in two-- primarily in two places in the income statement. One is in other cost of sales and the rest is in R&D. So it is in that line item that's impacting cost of sales. Now we've had some efficiencies there, and I did mention the improvement in our overall cost of headcount growth and compensation, kind of moderating those growth.
So that helps us as well, more than offset the depreciation increases in Q1, but as I mentioned, this number will be higher in the coming quarters. Recall, we have -- we said approximately $75 billion in CapEx, which is up from $55 billion or just over $50 billion last year. So there is expected to be quite a significant increase in depreciation.

Operator

Ron Josey, Citi.

Ron Josey

Great. Thanks for taking the question, Philip. I wanted to touch a little bit more on your comments around direct response in YouTube. I think it's been improving and been a driver over the past couple of quarters. I'd love to hear more just about what's driving that? Is that the demand gen and integration with PMAX? Or are users perhaps more involved on direct response now that shorts usage is driving? We'd love your thoughts there.

Philipp Schindler

Yes. I think there is a lot of different factors. Mostly, we continue to help our customers really using our AI power tools. You mentioned a few of them to drive performance. That's a very big one. As I mentioned before, we're also happy with the progress we're seeing on shorts and closing the monetization gap here to the overall business, which is actually really nice to see, especially in the US. So we're very happy with that. Yes.

Sundar Pichai

And I'll just chime in to say, YouTube just celebrated its 20th birthday, and we now have more than 20 billion videos on YouTube, and we get 20 million videos uploaded every day. So I think it's a tremendous platform and thanks to all the creators and users who have supported us there over the years.

Operator

Thank you. And that concludes our question-and-answer session for today. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jim Friedland for any further remarks.

Jim Friedland

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you again on our second quarter 2025 call. Thank you, and have a good evening.

Operator

Thank you, everyone. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.