A quarterly report has become solid evidence that AI is moving from a story of burning money to a reality of making money. On July 23, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai posted the second-quarter results on the social media platform X. The confidence behind his opening statement, "This quarter was amazing, and our AI investments are redefining the possibilities in every part of our business," comes from some impressive numbers.

The most striking aspect is the acceleration of the overall performance. Alphabet's revenue grew by 24% year-over-year in the second quarter, while Google Cloud's growth rate soared to 82%, becoming the strongest engine driving the entire company. From search to YouTube to the Gemini app, Pichai described this growth curve as "completely positive." What supports it is the AI infrastructure investment, which has been repeatedly questioned for being too heavy in recent years.

image.png

Signals from the user side are equally eye-catching. The monthly active users of the Gemini app have reached 950 million, approaching the one billion mark. This means a conversational product driven by large models has quickly grown into a global consumer-level entry point in a very short time. More importantly, there's a sharp increase in model usage: Google's model API now processes 22 billion tokens per minute, up from over 16 billion in the previous quarter. In just one quarter, the Flash series models have increased this number by nearly 40%. Pichai called Flash the main workhorse, which also confirms that low-cost, high-throughput models are becoming the default choice in real production environments.

In the enterprise market, Gemini Enterprise has been adopted by 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, and demand for security solutions remains strong. When the top companies integrate Gemini into their workflows, the value of AI for enterprises is no longer just a pilot project demonstration but has already been reflected in procurement and deployment.