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Alphabet is out with its numbers now. Um the cloud number which we've talked about being so important here does look like it's a little bit light of estimates, although numbers overall beat estimates. Let's run through them. First quarter earnings per share $2.81, that is 80 cents above analysts' estimates. Revenue coming in at about $90.2 billion, that's above the $89.1 billion that was estimated by analysts. And that cloud revenue number at $12.26 billion a little bit shy of the $12.32 billion that analysts had been estimating, but overall revenue ex-traffic acquisition costs, which is the measure that we look at for uh Alphabet's revenue most closely, $76.49 billion. That is ahead of about $75.4 billion that analysts had been anticipating. I also want to mention ad revenue here because there's been all of this concern about are we going to start to see? I mean, you know, Google, like many of these companies, we talk about in big tech are not necessarily directly affected by tariffs, but if there is a decrease in ad demand or demand from businesses in some way, would they see it in advertising? They're not seeing it yet. Ad revenue at $66.89 billion that is also ahead of estimates here. So that's something um to keep in mind. Um YouTube ad revenue uh pretty much in line with estimates here as well. Um and the company is announcing some cash return to shareholders, a 5% increase in its dividend and an increased buyback authorization of $70 billion uh worth. So pretty a sizable addition to that year. Um the company's first quarter capex should mention $17.2 billion, which was also pretty much in line with estimates. I'm still waiting for the uh release itself to kind of update here to get some color, but um just to get some instant reaction for you guys, Mark, I know you you had some pretty big hopes for what what we might hear from some of big cap tech. In the case of of Alphabet, they seem to have delivered.

Look, Alphabet has had eight straight quarters of revenue beats, and make this number nine. So it's pretty impressive that they continue to operate at a very high level. 281 versus 201. We haven't had time to dig into the numbers all that much yet, but that's a pretty impressive beat on the, you know, looking at not only revenues and earnings at a time when arguably the market made a short-term minor breakout today. So being that, you know, Google is is 5% within QQQ given the A shares and the C shares, I mean, that that's pretty encouraging, I think, for, you know, potentially what futures could do as a result of this.

Yeah, it's interesting to see sort of the 5% pop off these numbers because I think one of the big questions with Alphabet, just reading through different analyst commentary on the street ahead of the release, was there was definitely a growing fear that maybe the numbers come in line or potentially even miss. It seemed like some of those whisper numbers were actually lower than sort of what consensus estimates were. And so I think when you sort of make sense of how the numbers came in versus that, it's a good read. Also, Julie, you had highlighted that capex number, and to see the capex number slightly above expectations versus being below, right? Of course, capex being a big part of what we're talking about with these companies. I don't think we got capex guidance yet. I think that comes on the call. And that's sort of kind of the looming big question here, I think, right? Is if that if capex comes down later this year from what they were providing.

And one of the other big questions around Alphabet, around all of these big cap tech uh companies, is how are their customers using AI? Are they paying for it? What are they doing with it? We got a little bit of commentary around that from CEO Sundar Pichai here in this statement. He talked about search seeing continued strong growth. It was boosted, he says, by engagement we're seeing with features like AI overviews. He says that has one and a half billion users per month. Uh it's funny AI overview. I never I don't know that I ever opted into it. I I just it comes up every time I Google. So I guess that's why it has so many users per month. But he also says uh YouTube and Google One have surpassed 270 million paid subscriptions. So that's something to highlight as well. So interesting here. Again, on the call we'll get more color around capex and around AI and what's going on there.