Meanwhile, the company expects the launch of its new Gemini 2.0 AI model to help drive growth as it moves closer to being a universal assistant. The model has more advanced multimodal and agentic capabilities and will also be used to power its AI Overviews within search. It said its consumer Gemini app is also gaining traction.

Alphabet shares fell 8% on Wednesday as investors balked at the Google parent's slowing cloud growth and planned $75 billion capital spending for the year, underscoring growing fears over Big Tech's escalating artificial intelligence costs.

From a purely business financials perspective, a large part of the reason for the sell-off stemmed from slowing growth in data centres revenue. Google’s cloud business is a huge money driver and posted a 30 per cent increase in revenues, totalling nearly $12bn (£9.6bn).

Google parent Alphabet Inc. posted fourth-quarter revenue that missed analysts’ expectations after growth in its cloud business slowed, raising concern from investors about the billions the company is spending on artificial intelligence.

The search giant said it will spend a staggering $75 billion this year as the AI arms race heats up. Investors may have concerns about whether it will pay off. Shares in Google’s parent company, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG),

Key Takeaways Shares of Google parent Alphabet tumbled Wednesday amid worries about whether the tech giant's spending on AI will pay off. Several analysts lowered their price targets for the stock, citing concerns about the company's weaker-than-expected cloud growth and plans to ramp up spending on AI.