Big Tech Earnings Analysis, Media Startup Fact-Checking AI, and Grammarly’s Rebrand | Oct 30, 2025

Akash Pasricha (0:13)

Welcome, everyone, to The Informations TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Thursday, October 30th. We had a great couple days on the road at Adobe Max in Los Angeles and our WTF Summit in Napa Valley. But today, we are back at it in our New York studio. We've got a bunch of earnings to break down. We'll bring on our Microsoft and our Google reporters. We're also bringing on some big names in Venture Capital to help us make a sense of the results. Tomasz Tunguz and Roy Bahat are coming on the show. We've then got some more highlights from WTF, including takeaways from our Summit with our Editor-in-Chief in Conversations with veteran news anchor Campbell Brown and entrepreneur Lucy Guo. It's going to be a great show and a busy show, so let's get right on into things. Last night, Microsoft and Google were the two biggest AI companies that reported their quarterly results. We're going to get to Meta in just a moment, but I want to bring on our Microsoft reporter Erin Holmes and our Google reporter Erin Woo to help us make sense of last night's prints. Erin and Erin, welcome to the show. It's great to have the both of you here.

Erin Woo (1:18)

Thanks for having us.

Akash Pasricha (1:20)

I'm going to need to be very specific when I call on each of you to make sure we know who I'm talking about. I want to start with the results broadly here. Microsoft, we know revenue was up 18 percent. That was the same as last year. Alphabet revenue growth actually accelerated to 16 percent. Erin Woo, let's start with you. What is, and I should say before we get into things, I want to go sort of segment by segment here. We'll talk about the cloud business and then we'll break down the other segments. Let's start with Google Cloud, Erin Woo. What is driving the growth in the cloud business and how did that segment perform?

Erin Woo (1:56)

Right, so Google's cloud business is doing really well right now. I do want to caveat that by saying that it is still in third place behind AWS and behind Microsoft, but it's growing really quickly. A lot of that has to do with what Google says is it's end-to-end AI stack. They have everything from chips, they're developing their own tensor processing units or TPUs, and they also are developing their own AI models that they sell through a lot of different things, but primarily through the Vertex platform. That is driving a ton of growth in the Cloud business. Revenue from the Cloud business rose 34 percent year-over-year this past quarter and operating profit did even better, rose really remarkable 84 percent this past quarter. The Cloud business is doing really well.

Akash Pasricha (2:45)

Right. As you said, they're in an interesting position here because like you said, they've got the chips, they've got the models, they all obviously have the Cloud business. Aaron Holmes, let's come to you. What did we learn about Microsoft's Cloud business in Azure?

Aaron Holmes (3:00)

Yeah, Microsoft also reported really strong Cloud growth. It was 40 percent growth which was higher than they had previously projected for the quarter. They did say that a lot of that growth came from OpenAI renting Azure servers, and there was a little bit of trepidation from some of the analysts who were on the call asking if Microsoft is too concentrated in OpenAI as a customer. But the company was also careful to call out that they have several hundred million dollar contracts for the quarter from other customers to try to assuage some of those concerns. Overall, we saw revenue grow at 18 percent, which is the same rate as the quarter prior.

Akash Pasricha (3:40)

That leads us into a nice discussion about CapEx, and CapEx is broadly the story that tends to dominate some of the headlines here for earnings for the big tech companies including for Meta, which we're going to get to in a moment here. But Erin Woo, what do we know about the CapEx for Google? What are they spending on? They talked about a lot of it being for internal use. What do we know about that?

Erin Woo (4:02)

Yeah. So a lot of Google's CapEx is for internal use. It's for what Google needs to power its own services. The difference between, not to spoil the next segment, this difference between Google or Microsoft as compared to Meta is there's also the growth of this Cloud business. A lot of these capital expenditures are to support expenses for the Cloud business for Google's customers. That's how they're getting a return on their investments from some of the spend. Google actually raised its projections to 91 to 93 billion this year. They spent 24 billion on capital expenditures in the third quarter. They're spending a ton of money as they continue to invest in AI and grow their Cloud business.