The latest Q2 earnings reports from Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft show an uptick in revenue from advertising, with growth driven by AI.
Big tech firms revealed a strong performance in their Q2 2026 earnings report, with Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all seeing advertising growth boost revenue.
All four companies saw an increase in revenue overall since Q1 2026 reports.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and Microsoft attributed a significant portion of their revenue growth from search advertising.
Amazon’s AWS has been “booming”, contributing to more than a third in increased revenue for the e-commerce giant.
Meanwhile Meta, which did see some revenue growth, acknowledged its expenditure increased by more than half.
Alphabet: Search growth driven by AI
Alphabet’s Q2 2026 revenue grew 24% year-on-year (YoY), which has largely been driven by the company’s AI investments.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive at the tech giant, said in the investors call: “AI is the most profound platform shift of our lifetimes. It’s lighting up every part of our business, driving an expansionary moment in search, turbocharging Cloud and much more.”
He highlighted Alphabet’s annual revenue has more than doubled to more than $400bn between 2020 and 2025; and added $63bn to its top line in the past 12 months.
Google search quarterly revenue grew by 17% – a slightly slower rate compared to Q1, which saw revenue grow by 19%.
Pichai noted that since expanding AI mode globally last October, Google has surpassed one billion monthly active users on search. He added: “Just like AI Overviews, AI Mode is driving an incremental increase in search queries overall, and we’re now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in search.”
In addition, the latest report showed the Gemini app now has 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling in the last year.
YouTube Ads grew by 13% YoY in Q2 2026. The platform’s total revenue for 2025 surpassed $60bn – that’s across ads and subscriptions.
Pichai pointed out that 1.7 billion unique viewers tuned in to watch World Cup related video on YouTube, adding that more than 140 millions users now engage on the platform.
Going forward, across search and the Gemini app, the firm will be rolling out Personal Intelligence, which connects to users Google apps to provide personalised suggestions. It will also be phasing in its new conversational search experience, powered by Gemini into YouTube, called Ask YouTube.
Pichai said: “Google Ads is a growth engine for millions of businesses worldwide. Gemini is enabling them to reach more customers with greater speed and precision. Through AI Max and Performance Max, advertisers can use gen AI to automatically customise text, synthesise creative assets and dynamically bid across all Google channels.”
Meta: Ad prices rise as expenses soar
Despite higher costs, Meta’s Q2 revenue is currently at $60.6bn – a 28% YoY increase.
The social media giant’s total costs and expenses increased by 55% to $42.03bn, which includes $2.4bn in charges relating to legal proceedings and $1.18bn in severance expenses for the redundancies in May 2026.
The company’s advertising revenue for Q2 2026 reached $59.4m, of which $23.3m came from the US and Canada and $14.1m from Europe. This is an increase from the previous quarter, when ad revenue hit $55m.
It has partially been driven by an increase in the average price per ad, which went up by 12% YoY.
Meta highlighted that ad impressions across its family of apps increased by 14% YoY globally. Asia-Pacific had the highest growth rate of 17%, with Europe at 13% and US and Canada at 9%.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Meta, said: “AI is accelerating our core business today, powering our next generation of products, and opening the door to entirely new enterprise opportunities.
“The results are already showing, and I’m optimistic about the potential ahead.”
Amazon: AWS is ‘booming’ says CEO
Amazon did better than expected with its revenue in Q2 2026 coming in at $200.6bn versus the estimated $196.47bn. It equates to a 20% YoY increase compared to the same period in 2025.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is “booming” said Andy Jassy, president and chief executive at Amazon. Its revenue reached $42.2bn, up 37% YoY from $30.9 in Q2 2025 – the segment’s fastest growth in 18 months and puts it on track to a $169bn annualised revenue run rate.
The e-commerce giant’s advertising arm brought $19.81bn in revenue for Q2 2026 – up by more than quarter (26%) YoY from $15.7bn.
Amazon highlighted how its expanded ads agent – an AI-powered tool that simplifies planning, launching and managing campaigns – is now available in 11 markets. For advertisers using this tool, it lowers cost-per-impression by 8% and cost-per-acquisition by 6%.
During the investors call, Jassy said Amazon now expects to spend $220bn on AI in capital expenditures in 2026, up from its previous estimate of $200bn, due to higher memory costs.
Even at that level, however, Amazon still won’t “have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026. And I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027 too”, he told investors. “In fact the demand we already have for 2028 is striking.”
Microsoft: Search advertising revenue up
Revenue for Microsoft Corp increased by 18% to reach $90bn, with its net income coming in at $35.8bn.
The company highlighted that “several discrete items” impacted its financial results this quarter, which resulted in “a benefit of $0.27 on diluted earnings per share”.
This included a $3.2bn gain from its investment in AI firm Anthropic and lower-than-expected expenses relating to headcount.
Microsoft’s revenue for ‘more personal computing’, which includes its search advertising arm, was down by 4% to $12.9bn.
Search advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs (TAC), actually offset much of the decline, as it grew by 10%, largely driven by higher revenue per share and search volume across Bing and Edge.
Speaking on the outlook, Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, said on the earnings call; “Search advertising revenue ex-TAC growth should be in the mid-single digits, down sequentially due to the impact of third-party partnerships. Growth will continue to be driven by consistent trends in revenue per search and volume.”
