Waymo recently closed a $5.6 billion Series C funding round led by parent company Alphabet and joined by a whoβs who of Silicon Valley venture firms. The investment boosts Waymoβs overall valuation to more than $45 billion, according to Bloomberg News. Alphabet had previously announced in July that it was pledging another $5 billion to [β¦]
Alphabetβs profit jumped 34 percent in the third quarter as the parent company of search giant Google reported strong growth in its cloud business amid robust demand for computing and data services used to train and run generative artificial intelligence models.
The solid results released on Tuesday helped alleviate investorsβ fears about the financial returns on the vast sums being spent on AI by Alphabet and other Big Tech peers as they seek to dominate the nascent sector. The standout unit was Google Cloud, where revenue increased 35 percent to $11.4 billion and operating profit increased sevenfold to $1.9 billion from $266 million in the same period last year.
Net income was $26.3 billion compared with $19.7 billion in the same period a year earlier, exceeding analystsβ expectations for $22.8 billion. Revenue rose 15 percent to $88.3 billion in the three months through to the end of September, beating the average estimate for $86.3 billion.