John Paulson Stays Gold, Alphabet After the Bell, and the Hugging Face Hack 7/22/26

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**Kelly Evans** (1:00)
You're listening to The Exchange. Here's today's show.
Leslie, thank you very much. Stocks are shaking off their earlier losses as oil prices rise. The S&P has now gone positive. Nvidia's up 3% and the biggest earnings event of the season is just a few hours away. I'm Kelly Evans and welcome to The Exchange. And it's the headline being heard around the world today. A test version of OpenAI broke out, got itself on the internet and hacked Hugging Face, which is like a GitHub for AI. We'll get reaction from a cyber expert on that story later on. We are also keeping an eye on oil prices as Brent hits nearly $95 overnight and WTI is back over $86 a barrel. The national average for gasoline, by the way, up to $4.06 today. And billionaire investor John Paulson joins us just off his latest gold deal with another legendary commodities billionaire, Thomas Kaplan. We'll ask them both about the recent pullback in gold, currency markets, and whether they think AI is in a bubble or is a commodity. They'd be uniquely positioned to talk about that. But let's begin with Alphabet's results to do out after the bell today. The entire AI trade, not to make too much of it, but the entire AI trade is poised to rise or fall, depending on what they say about their future capital spending plans. Mackenzie Segalos has more for us in today's Tech Check. Mackenzie?

**Mackenzie Sigalos** (2:19)
Kelly, there's a lot riding on Alphabet tonight for the stock itself and for the rest of the Mag 7 companies being punished for aggressive AI spending. Last month's record hyperscalers sell-off only intensified that backlash, which really raises the stakes for Alphabet's spending outlook. The company more than doubled Capex last quarter, and Bank of America now sees it reaching 195 billion this year, nearly 300 billion next year. Now, some of that increase is inflationary, with rising memory prices pushing up the cost of the buildup, but Alphabet also cannot afford to slow down the rival's race to secure compute, especially with Gemini still perceived as trailing in some key areas. Google Cloud is the clearest test of whether that spending is paying off. The bar tonight is high, 63% revenue growth year over year, whisper number closer to 70%, along with stronger backlog and evidence that major deals are beginning to convert into sales. But Cloud still is not Alphabet's main revenue engine, Searches, and the concern for several quarters has been whether AI answers to cannibalize the highly profitable advertising business funding the build out. So far, that has not happened. Searches remain resilient. So Kelly, Alphabet really has to prove both sides tonight, that Cloud demand is strong enough to justify another step up in spending potentially, and that Search can keep generating the profits needed to support it.

**Kelly Evans** (3:39)
All right, so the key numbers, $45 billion, all right, or technically maybe 44.8 for the quarter, that's the expectation for Capex. For the year, let's say their previous expectation 180 to 190 billion, analysts probably now upwards of 200, and I think around 300 Mac is where they are for 2020, what's next year, seven. So those are the numbers, I think, right, that everyone's going to be keying into.

**Mackenzie Sigalos** (4:07)
Yeah, and also backlog because this is a best indicator of future revenue growth, and what I will say is interesting is that in Q1, we saw a Cloud revenue number of 20 billion. The street estimate for Q2 is 22 billion, so we're not seeing a big step up. Yes, it's 10 percent, but they're coming from a lower base.