Welcome everyone. Thank you for standing by for the Alphabet 2nd quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Jim Friedlin, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Alphabet 2nd quarter 2023 earnings conference call. With us today are Sundar Pichai, Philip Schindler and Ruth Peratt. Now I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations, and financial performance may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For more information please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent form 10k filed with the SEC. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Our reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release which is distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website located at abc.xyz forward slash investor. Our comments will be on year over year comparisons unless we state otherwise.
And now, I'll turn the call over to Sundar. Thank you Jim and hello everyone. We are holding our call from London today. It's an important hub for us and I'm excited to spend time with our local teams including Google DeepMind as well as leaders and partners from across the region. This quarter we shared great progress at IO, Brandcast and Google Marketing Live and we are looking forward to cloud next in August. The momentum across the company drove our results this quarter. We delivered solid performance in Search and YouTube and ongoing strong growth in cloud where we remain focused on long-term value creation. And we continue our important work to operate more efficiently creating durable savings to fund investments in our biggest priorities.
Today I'll talk about this momentum including our continued leadership in AI and our excitement about the evolution of Search. At IO we shared how we are making AI helpful for everyone in four important ways. First improving knowledge and learning. This is our seventh year as an AI first company and we intuitively know how to incorporate AI into our products. Large language models make them even more helpful models like Palm 2 and soon Gemini which we are building to be multi-model. These advances provide an opportunity to reimagine many of our products including our most important products Search. We are in a period of incredible innovation for Search which is continuously evolve over the years.
This quarter saw our next major evolution with the launch of the Search Generative Experience or SG which uses the power of Generative AI to make Search even more natural and intuitive. User feedback has been very positive so far. It can better answer the queries people come to us with today while also unlocking entirely new types of questions that Search can answer. For example, we found that Generative AI can connect the dots for people as they explore a topic or project helping them weigh multiple factors and personal preferences before making a purchase or booking a trip. We see this new experience as another jumping off point for exploring the web enabling users to go deeper to learn about a topic. I'm proud of the engineering excellence underlying our progress. Since the May launch, we've boosted serving efficiency reducing the time it takes to generate AI snapshots by half. We'll deliver even faster responses over time. We are engaging with the broader ecosystem and will continue to prioritize approaches that send valuable traffic and support a healthy open web.
Ads will continue to play an important role in this new Search experience. Many of these new queries are inherently commercial in nature. We have more than 20 years of XP in serving ads relevant to users' commercial queries and SGE enhances our ability to do this even better. We are testing and evolving placements and formats and giving advertisers tools to take advantage of Generative AI.
Second, we are helping people use AI to boost their creativity and productivity. One example is BARD, our experiment in conversational AI. Since launching in March it continues to get better. We rolled out a number of exciting features and capabilities earlier this month. BARD is now available in most of the world and over 40 of the most widely spoken languages. We also added Google Lens capabilities so you can take an image and ask all kinds of questions. Turn it into code and more. This new feature has been really popular and it's been great to see people sharing their experiences. BARD can now read its responses aloud and you can adjust them for tone and style. We continue to see great interest in using BARD for coding tasks.
On productivity earlier this year we introduced Duvat AI in both Google Cloud and Workspace. It helps people collaborate with AI to code write and get better insights from data and more. Today more than 750,000 Workspace users have access to the new features in preview.
Third we are making it easier for others to innovate using AI. One way is by providing Google Cloud's high performance infrastructure optimized for a range of generated AI models. It's being used by thousands of customers and partners to transform their businesses. I'll give an update on the cloud business in just a moment.
Finally we are making sure we develop and deploy AI technology responsibly so that everyone can benefit. Last week we signed on to joint commitments with other leading AI companies at the White House building on the principles that have guided our work for many years.
To take advantage of the AI opportunities ahead we've been sharpening our focus as a company investing responsibly with great discipline and finding areas where we can operate more cost effectively. We've made good progress in data center machine efficiency which will pay dividends as we continue to invest in AI. We continue to slow our expense growth and pace of hiring and ensure our teams are aligned to our highest priorities. This quarter we reallocated a number of teams including aligning, phases ad sales with our existing business organization. We are combining various engineering efforts across core infrastructure and cloud. Products like Bardon SGE are being built by small fast-moving teams that have been reallocated to these high priority efforts. Overall we are actively moving people to higher priority activities within the company and we continue to optimize our real estate footprint for current and future needs.
Next Google Cloud we see continued growth with Q2 revenue of $8 billion up 28% and operating profit of $395 million. Our AI optimized infrastructure is a leading platform for training and serving generative AI models. More than 70% of Gen AI unicorns are Google Cloud customers including Kohir, Jasper, Typeface and many more. We provide the widest choice of AI supercomputer options with Google TPUs and advanced NVIDIA GPUs and recently launched new A3 AI super computers powered by NVDS H100. This enables customers like AppLaven to achieve nearly two times better price performance than industry alternatives. Our new generative AI offerings are expanding our total addressable market and winning new customers. We are seeing strong demand for the more than 80 models including third party and popular open source in our vertex search and conversational AI platforms with the number of customers growing more than 15x from April to June. Among them price line is improving trip planning capabilities. Car4 is creating full marketing campaigns in a matter of minutes and cab Gemini is building hundreds of use cases to streamline time-consuming business processes. Our new anti-money laundering AI helps banks like HSBC identify financial crime risk and our new AI powered target and lead identification suite is being applied at cerebral to help enable drug discovery. Our generative AI capabilities also give us an opportunity to win new customers and upsell into our installed base of 9 million paying Google workspace customers. I mentioned Dewate AI earlier Instacart is using a team-proof customer service workflows and companies like X10 are scaling sales outreach and optimizing customer service. Customers confidently choose workspace because of the safety and security we provide their distributed workforces. Our AI capabilities are helping us differentiate core products like cybersecurity. We have integrated AI throughout our portfolio winning organizations like Pfizer who are using Google Cloud transform their security operations. Chronicle security operations suite with Mandy and fully integrated is helping customers stay protected at every stage of the security lifecycle. In the first half of 2023 we saw a 35% increase in incident response engagements compared to the same period last year.
Finally, our AI capabilities are also expanding our partner ecosystem with hundreds of ISVs and SaaS providers such as Box, Salesforce, and Snorkel, and the world's largest consulting firms like Accenture and Deloitte. They've collectively committed to train more than 150,000 people on Google Cloud-generated AI.
Turning next to YouTube, earlier this year we shared that revenues across YouTube products were nearly 40 billion for the 12 months ending in March. I'm really pleased with how YouTube is growing audiences and driving increased engagement.
YouTube shots are now watched by over 2 billion logged-in users every month, up from 1.5 billion just one year ago. The living room remained our fastest-growing screen in 2022 in terms of watch time. We are reaching more than 150 million people on connected TV screens in the US and seeing growth and momentum internationally.
And on subscriptions, there is good growth. Late last year, we announced over 80 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers. Sign-ups for NFL Sunday ticket kicked off in April, and we look forward to hosting our first football season on YouTube this fall.
Finally, hardware and Android Pixel continue to have strong sales momentum. We introduced new Pixel devices at I.O., including Pixel Fold, Pixel Tablet, and Pixel 7a, and we've had a great response. Android 14, our latest OS, will incorporate our advances in generative AI to personalize Android phones. The Pixel and Android teams are working together to advance the latest devices. The Pixel Fold is a great example, with its many hardware and software innovations.
最后,硬件和安卓像素持续保持强劲的销售势头。我们在开发者大会上推出了新的像素设备,包括像素折叠手机、像素平板和像素 7a,反响非常好。我们的最新操作系统安卓 14 将融入我们在生成 AI 方面的进展,以个性化安卓手机。像素和安卓团队正在共同努力推进最新设备的发展。像素折叠手机是一个很好的例子,它具有许多硬件和软件创新。
Before I close, you may have seen that we just announced some exciting news that Ruth is taking on the important new role of President and Chief Investment Officer. As our longest-serving CFO, she has helped guide the company through an amazing period of growth, a global pandemic, and the ongoing economic uncertainty that has followed. I'm excited to continue to work with Ruth, who will lead our 2024 planning and remain a CFO while we do a full search for a successor. So it's business as usual now and no change in approach for the future. I look forward to seeing the impact Ruth will have in our new role, driving our investments, engaging with our stakeholders, and creating opportunities for people and communities everywhere.
To close, I'm energized by the pace of innovation and the momentum across the company, with 15 products that each serve a half a billion people and six that serve over two billion each. We have so many opportunities to deliver on our mission. Thank you to our employees around the world for their great work this quarter.
Thanks Ondre and hello everyone. Happy to be here with you all today.
谢谢Ondre,大家好。很高兴今天能和大家在这里共聚一堂。
Let's jump right into our performance for the quarter. Google services revenues of 66 billion were up 5% year-on-year. In Google advertising, search, and other revenues grew 5% year-on-year, led by solid growth in the retail vertical. In YouTube ads, revenues were up 4% year-on-year, driven by growth in brand followed by direct response reflecting further stabilization and advertiser spend. In network revenues declined 5% year-on-year. Google other revenues were up 24% year-on-year, led by strong growth in YouTube subscriptions revenues.
Let's now take a few minutes to cover our three key priority areas: Google AI, retail, and YouTube, which I've laid out in prior quarters as clear opportunities for long-term advertising growth. I'll then turn it over to Ruth for more details on our financial performance.
Q2 was a big quarter for Google AI, and our ads products IO, GML, and Brandcast were testament to our deep commitment to building cutting-edge tools and solutions that help businesses navigate complexity in real time and deliver the results they need, all while improving the experience for users. Sundar covered some of these innovations, I'll share more.
It's worth reiterating that while generative AI is now supercharging new and existing ads products with tons of potential ahead, AI has been at the core of our ads business for years. In fact, today nearly 80% of advertisers already use at least one AI-powered search ads product. Our approach to AI and ads remains grounded in understanding what drives real value for businesses right now and what's most helpful for users.
Advertisers tell us they're looking for a more assistive experience to get set up with us faster, so at GML, we launched a new conversational experience in Google Ads, powered by a LLM tuned specifically from ads data to make campaign construction easier than ever. Advertisers also tell us they want help creating high-quality ads that work in an instant, so we're rolling out a revamped asset creation flow and Performance Max (PMAX) that helps customers adapt and scale their most successful creative concepts in a few clicks.
And there's even more with PMAX. We launched new asset insights and new search term insights that improve campaign performance understanding in new customer lifecycle goals. that let advertisers optimize for new and existing customers while maximizing sales. We've long said it's all about reaching the right customer with the right creative at the right time so later this year automatically created assets which are already generating headlines and descriptions for search ads will start using generative AI to create assets that are even more relevant to customer queries. Broadmatch also got updates. AI based keyword prioritization ensures the right keyword bid budget creative and landing page is chosen when there are multiple overlapping keywords eligible and then to make it easier for advertisers to optimize visual storytelling and drive consideration in the mid funnel we're launching two new AI powered ad solutions demand gen and video view campaigns and both will include shorts inventory.
Sundar talked earlier about SGE and our early experiments with new ad formats when active conversations with advertisers publishers and partners to get their input on how to make these solutions work best for them and are excited to test and evolve this experience as we learn more.
Let's pivot to retail where we had a good quarter profitability remains a top theme for retailers so solutions like PMAX that drive bottom line value continue to do well. We also continue to see success in helping businesses unlock efficient growth and deliver on their omni-channel goals. Take ACE hardware who tapped into AI powered search and omni-bidding to capture increased seasonal demand leading up to Memorial Day. This drove increases across online sales, store visits and in-store sales resulting in 87% year-year growth in omni revenue from Google Ads and led to one of the largest revenue weeks ever for ACE store onos.
Q2 also brought innovation on the consumer and merchant front. We rolled out a new gen AI powered virtual trion tool that brings the fitting room experience online. Shoppers can try on women's tops across a wide array of models from brands like anthropology, Everlane, H&M and Loft. Rich, visual engaging content is a win-win for both consumers and merchants. In fact, product office with more than one image see a 76% average increase in impressions and a 32% increase in clicks. Our new product studio uses gen AI to help retailers create tailored eye-catching imagery for free and we're working towards optimizing for performance. We think this will be a game changer especially for SMBs who can now create high-quality images to use both across Google and their own sites without spending a lot of time or money. As we continue to make Google a valuable place for merchants to grow their businesses and connect with users, merchant center next is another win. We've seen two X growth and the number of businesses using merchant center in the past two years and we're now simplifying it by automating inventory management and giving a consolidated view of performance insights. Better tools means better growth for merchants and better experiences for users.
Q2还在消费者和商家方面带来了创新。我们推出了一个全新的AI技术驱动的虚拟试衣间工具,使试衣间体验上线。购物者可以在像Anthropology、Everlane、H&M和Loft等品牌的各种模特身上试穿女装上衣。丰富、视觉引人入胜的内容对消费者和商家来说都是双赢的。事实上,拥有多个图像的产品页面的印象量平均增长了76%,点击量增加了32%。我们的新产品工作室利用AI技术帮助零售商免费创建定制的吸引人的图像,并致力于对性能进行优化。我们认为这将是一个改变游戏规则的举措,特别是对于小型企业来说,他们现在可以在谷歌和自己的网站上使用高质量图像,而不需要花费大量的时间或金钱。随着我们继续使谷歌成为商家发展业务和与用户互动的宝贵场所,下一个商家中心(Merchant Center Next)将是另一个胜利。在过去两年中,使用商家中心的企业数量增长了两倍,现在我们通过自动化库存管理和提供综合的性能洞察视图来简化它。更好的工具意味着对商家来说有更好的增长,对用户来说有更好的体验。
Moving to YouTube. I've said it before I'll say it again. YouTube starts with our creators and it's their success and our multi-format strategy that will drive YouTube's long-term growth. In prior quarters I've laid out how we think about this enabling our creators to make a living on our platform with more formats and awesome tools leads to more content which leads to quality consumption of video content, another big focus of the team and this leads to better opportunities for monetization and for advertisers to support this incredible ecosystem. As we think about growth we're focused on shorts, connected TV and our subscription offerings all of which grew nicely this quarter.
Let me double-click into shorts and CTV. First shorts, momentum remains strong. Watch time and monetization are moving in the right direction. Last year we introduced ads on shorts to help drive performance and direct response campaigns via video action, performance max and app campaigns. As of Q2 brand advertisers can start testing shorts ads and awareness campaigns. It's still early days but we're excited by the results.
La Nege, the more Pacific's number one premium skincare brand was an early adopter. It leaned into video reach campaigns and new creative over 10-day tests to drive a 21% increase. in unique users reach from shorts and in feet, all at a more efficient CPM.
La Nege,太平洋地区的顶级皮肤护理品牌,是一个早期的采用者。它通过视频广告、创新的10天测试来推动曝光用户数提高21%,同时在更高效的CPM下实现短视频和传统广告的覆盖。
Second, connected TV. Substantial engagement by viewers and our RIFR advertisers is driving monetization of the living room. We are very pleased with the growth we've seen and how we're delivering the reach results and relevance that businesses are looking for at scale. At Brandcast we announced two new ad offerings for streaming. First 30 second unskippable ads are coming to YouTube Select which is landing 70% plus of impressions on the TV screen. 30 second ads are a TV industry staple and now YouTube is bringing our advanced audience capabilities and unparalleled reach to the format. We're also exploring new pause experiences so brands can drive awareness or action when you hit pause.
Looking at YouTube holistically according to our measurement partners Nielsen, TransUnion and Ipsus MMA. YouTube delivers higher RIFR than TV and other online video on average. Take the Hershey company. As part of a multi-year partnership to optimize its YouTube strategy, Hershey's brands have been tapping into CTV efficient AI-powered formats and made-for platform creative leading to YouTube becoming its number one RRI driving media partner producing a 65% plus increase in RRI from 2018 to 2023.
One last highlight that bridges the power of YouTube with our continued efforts to bring the best across Google to our partners. With Warner Brothers Discovery we expanded our multi-year relationship across our entire Android ecosystem including partnering on the launch of Max, a deep and mutually beneficial relationship on Google TV and plans to work together on new surfaces. YouTube's expanded deal for Max inclusive of a Max NFL Sunday ticket bundle on YouTube TV also underscores our joint commitment to bring the highest quality content and experiences to our customers.
I'll close by echoing Sundar with a huge thank you to Googlers everywhere for their incredible passion and hard work and to our customers and partners for their continued collaboration and trust. Ruth over to you.
Thank you Philip. Before I go into the results first Sundar thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm very excited about the new role and I look forward to it. So turning to the results. We're very pleased with our financial results for the second quarter which reflect an acceleration of growth in search and momentum in cloud. My comments will be on year over year comparisons for the second quarter unless I state otherwise. I will start with results at the alphabet level followed by segment results and conclude with our outlook.
For the second quarter our consolidated revenues were 74.6 billion up 7% or up 9% in constant currency. Search remained the largest contributor to revenue growth. Total cost of revenues was 31.9 billion up 6% driven by other cost of revenues of 19.4 billion which was up 8%. Growth here was driven by content acquisition costs primarily for YouTube subscription offerings followed by hardware costs associated with pixel family launches in the second quarter. As noted in our earnings release the overall increase in data center and other operations costs was partially offset by a reduction in depreciation expense due to the change in estimated useful lives we discussed last quarter.
Operating expenses were 20.9 billion up 4%. Operating income was 21.8 billion up 12% and our operating margin was 29%. I will cover our expense and margin performance in our outlook. Other income and expense was 65 million. Net income was 18.4 billion. We delivered free cash flow of 21.8 billion in the second quarter and 71 billion for the trailing 12 months reflecting improved operating performance as well as the deferral of certain tax payments to the fourth quarter of 2023 as noted in our earnings release. We ended the quarter with 118 billion in cash and marketable securities.
Turning to our segment results prior period results have been recast for two changes that we made as of the first quarter. First deep mind is now reported as part of alphabets unallocated corporate costs. Second we updated our cost allocation methodologies.
In the second quarter we then combined the brain team from Google research with deep mind to form Google deep mind. Costs associated with the brain team which were previously included in Google services are now reported as part of alphabets unallocated corporate costs. We have not recast prior period results to reflect this additional change.
Within Google services revenues were 66.3 billion up 5%. Google search and other advertising revenues of 42.6 billion in the quarter were up 5% led by growth in retail. YouTube advertising revenues of 7.7 billion were up 4% driven by brand advertising followed by direct response reflecting further stabilization in spending by advertisers. Network advertising revenues of 7.9 billion were down 5%. Other revenues were 8.1 billion up 24% reflecting growth in YouTube non advertising revenues primarily from subscription growth in YouTube music premium and YouTube TV followed by growth in hardware revenues primarily driven by the launch of the Pixel 7a in the second quarter.
Finally play return to positive growth in the second quarter. TAC was 12.5 billion up 3%. Google services operating income was 23.5 billion up 8% and the operating margin was 35%.
Turning to the Google cloud segment revenues were 8 billion for the quarter up 28%. GCP revenue growth remained strong across geographies industries and products that being said we saw continued moderation in the rate of consumption growth as consumers optimized their spend. Google workspace strong revenue growth was driven by increases in both seats and average revenue per seat. Google cloud had operating income of 395 million and the operating margin was 5%.
As to our other bets for the second quarter revenues were 285 million and the operating loss was 813 million. The decrease in operating loss was primarily driven by a reduction in valuation based compensation liabilities related to certain other bets.
Turning to our outlook for the business with respect to Google services first within advertising we were pleased with the acceleration of search advertising revenue growth in the second quarter. Our continued ability to generate sustained growth reflects our unparalleled engineering innovation that creates extraordinary experiences for users and capabilities for advertisers and delivered with the deep expertise of our go to marketing. And in YouTube we saw ongoing signs of stabilization in advertiser spending. We are prioritizing product focus on increasing quality consumption of video content with both shorts and in the living room which is translating into improved monetization.
Second within other revenues in our YouTube subscription products the sustained strong growth in revenues reflects significant subscriber growth. You may have seen that last week we increased subscription prices for YouTube music and premium which underscores the value of the products. Strong year on your growth in hardware revenues was due in large part to a timing change given the Pixel 7a was launched in the second quarter whereas the Pixel 6a launch occurred in the third quarter last year.
Looking ahead the launch timing change will be a headwind to hardware revenue growth in the third quarter. Play returned to positive growth in the second quarter driven primarily by a solid increase in the number of buyers. Turning to Google cloud we are particularly excited about the customer interest in our AI optimized infrastructure our large language models our AI platform services and our new generative AI offerings such as duet AI for Google workspace although we are still clearly in the early days.
At the same time we continue to experience headwinds in the second quarter for moderation in consumption growth as customers optimize their spend. We continue to invest aggressively while remaining focused on profitable growth. In terms of expenses and profitability we remain very focused on durably re-engineering our cost base. Most evident to date are the actions we have taken to reduce the pace of headcount growth including the workforce reductions we announced in the first quarter and a slower pace of organic hiring and part given our focus on reallocating talent from within to fuel our growth priorities.
A quick comment on the sequential improvement in operating margins in the second quarter. There are two factors to note. First the benefit from an acceleration and search advertising revenue growth in the second quarter. Second the vast majority of the charges related to our workforce reduction and optimization of our global office space were taken in Q1.
Finally as it relates to CAPEX in Q2 the largest component was for servers which included a meaningful increase in our investments in AI compute. The sequential step up in the second quarter was lower than anticipated for two reasons. First with respect to office facilities we continue to moderate the pace of fit outs and ground up construction to reflect the slower expected pace of headcount growth. Second there were delays in certain data center construction projects.
We expect elevated levels of investment in our technical infrastructure increasing through the back half of 2023 and continuing to grow in 2024. The primary driver is to support the opportunities we see in AI across alphabet including investments in GPUs and proprietary TPUs as well as data center capacity.
With all that said we remain committed to durably re-engineering our cost base in order to help create capacity for these investments in support of long-term sustainable financial value.
Thank you Sundar, Philip and I will now take your questions.
谢谢,桑达尔和菲利普,我会回答你们的问题。
Thank you as a reminder to ask a question you will need to press star one on your telephone. To prevent any background noise we ask that you please mute your line once your question has been stated.
Our first question comes from Brian Noahck of Morgan Stanley please go ahead.
我们的第一个问题来自根斯坦利摩根士丹利的布莱恩·诺亚克,请提问。
Just taking my questions I have to the first one up for Sundar. I'm curious to learn about some of your early learning and surprises around consumer behavior on how people are using bard versus search and what new behaviors or consumer utility are you most excited about as you think about what Gemini could provide for people over the course of the next year or so.
And then the second one for Ruth, Ruth congrats on the new position. One question is about the durable expense comments. I think last quarter you talked about the idea that expenses could grow slower than revenue in 2024. Is that still the right way to think about it and just to confirm does that include the impact of depreciation in those comments?
Thanks Brian I'll take the first part. You know it's definitely early days but both across bard and search and rate of experience. You know feedback has been very positive from our users. I think you know we are definitely now you know able to serve. You know I would say deeper and broader information use cases which is very exciting.
Yeah you know I wouldn't say surprise. So for example people really using it to for coding you know something we understood but it's definitely on the news side. There's a lot of excitement around we integrated Google Lens into bard. We have known how how big Google Lens can be. We see that in the visual searches. We get and how much it has grown over the last two years and so we've been doing this for a while but definitely that in bard has been super well received. So which gives me a sense that as given Gemini is being built from the ground up to be multi-modal I think that's an area that's going to excite users and I go back many years ago when we did universal search whenever for users we can abstract different content types and put them in a seamless way. They tend to receive it well and so I'm definitely excited about what's ahead.
And on your second question Brian we are really pleased with the operating performance in the second quarter. We've been saying for some time that we are focused on revenue growth ahead of expense growth and achieved that for the first time in some time and that is cost of sales plus operating expense overall and we do remain very focused on durably re-engineering our cost-based there are a lot of stream work streams that are in flight and I mentioned a couple of them in opening comments this remains a major priority as Cinder and I both commented on. Great thank you both. Thank you.
The next question comes from Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs please go ahead.
下一个问题来自高盛的埃里克·谢里丹,请提问。
Thank you so much for taking the questions maybe you want for Cinder and one also for Ruth. Cinder you know can you talk a little bit about elements of open source versus closed and things like custom silicon and how you're thinking about AI offerings broadly developing over the next couple years and what you see is some of the key differentiation points that Google either through the cloud business or the consumer offerings are going to bring to market and how we should think about differentiation playing out to a greater degree in AI in the years ahead there'll be number one and then Ruth I'll let go Brian's congrats as well on the new role you know maybe both of you could talk to why this type of role might be important at this point in.
time for alphabet and and Ruth what you're looking to sort of drive into the organization from this new role as you move into it in the fall. Thanks. Thanks Eric on the first part you know obviously a big topic you know would broadly say you know the investments for AI you know when you look at the type of deep computer science work the talent we have worked hard to bring to the company and from the ground up the infrastructure we have built from the earliest days Google has been a company we've thought about the switches in our data centers wherever we think we can do the best and get a get an advantage by by innovating we have chosen to do so we have done that on AI on the on the silicon side but what's important to us is really you know stay focused on our users and customers and you know support all the innovations that's needed
so for example with cloud we've been we've really embraced open architecture we you know we have embraced customers wanting to be multi-cloud when it makes sense for them so similarly you would see with AI we will embrace you know we will offer not just our first-party models we'll offer third-party models including open source models I think open sources are critical role to play in this ecosystem Google contributes we are one of the largest contributors to if you if you look at hugging phase and in terms of the contribution there when you look at projects like Android chromium and so on Kubernetes and so on so we'll embrace that and we'll stay at the cutting edge of technology and I think I think that'll serve us well for the long term on the second part of your question first of all I'm very grateful and thankful to all the work that Ruth was done for the company it's too invaluable to capture in words I am super thrilled that she's going to continue on an impactful new role and at the scale of her company with the broad changes in technology
I think it's more important than ever before to engage on these issues globally at scale you know and advocate on the economic opportunity of the investments we make across alphabet and Google and I'm glad that she's going to continue a CFO and so no changes there and we'll take the time to find a successor and Ruth will be closely involved not just on that but also our long-range planning including 20-24 Ruth anything bad just to underscore when you asked the point about impact one of the places Sunder and I have discussed quite a bit is landing well the 2024 capital plan and the multi-year plan and completing all of the very important efforts we have underway we're excited about what they mean setting the company up well to be able to invest for long-term growth and so we're continuing to execute against those and then I think Sunder summarized it well we see technology can make such a difference in the lives of so many and the lives of economies and to be able to focus on the impact on economic growth and the opportunity for people for organizations for countries I think is a privilege I'm really excited about it in particular with this amazing company and so focusing there as well as the investments that we make across alphabet to drive economic growth globally across numerous sectors.
Great thank you. Thank you the next question comes from Doug and of GP Morgan please go ahead. Thanks for taking questions one for Sunder and one for Ruth for Sunder. Curious how do you think about timing for more broadly integrating generative AI into search and more specifically what are some of the things you'll need to see to do that and then Ruth just on capex the two two capex lower than expected as you explained do you still expect modestly higher capex in 23 versus 22 and then I know it's getting a little bit ahead but how should we think about kind of timing of that real estate and office optimization efforts you know through 23 and then also into 24 thanks.
Look on the search and rate of experience you know we we definitely you know wanted to make sure we're thinking deeply from first principles while it's exciting new technology if constantly been bringing in you know AI innovations into search for the past few years and this is the next step in that journey but you know it is a big change so we thought about. from first principles it really gives us a chance to now not always be constrained in the way search was working before allowed us to think outside the box and you know I see that play out in the experience so I would say you know we are ahead of where I thought we would be at this point in time and the feedback has been very positive you know we've just improved our efficiency pretty dramatically since the product launch the latency has improved significantly we are keeping a very high bar and but I would say we are I had on all the metrics in terms of how we look at it internally and so couldn't be more pleased with it and so you will you will see us continue to bring it to more and more users and over time this will just be how search works and so while it's you know we are taking deliberate steps you know we are building the next major revolution in search and I'm pleased with how it's going so far in terms of cab backs I tried to lay out sort of the cadence of cab backs and the point what's an important one that the sequential step up in the second quarter was lower than anticipated for the two reasons I noted one the work that we're doing around office facilities and then the delays in certain data center construction projects but that's why we wanted to be really clear that we do expect elevated levels of investment in our technical infrastructure and that would be increasing through the back half of 2023 consistent with the comments we've made previously that we had expected 2023 to be higher and given the slower start at the front half of the year and then continuing to grow into 2024 and the primary driver of this as you know well is to support the opportunities we see in AI across the company including the investments that we've already talked about proprietary TPUs all that we're doing with GPUs as well as data center capacity and as we continue to see the pace of innovation accelerate we just want to make sure we're positioned to address the opportunity across alphabet and to your the other part of your question when we look at real estate optimization that's one of many work streams that are important when we talk about durably re-engineering our cost base to create capacity for investments and support long-term sustainable financial value and we're continuing to work against that.
I wanted to just follow up on the some of the SGE questions and just get a sense I know it's early but what are you seeing in terms of of monetization and how do you guys think about that as you scale up the deployment of SGE is that I think there's a lot of concern out there that that maybe in the short term it's a bit of a headwind but over the longer term maybe maybe query growth from a more useful product can kind of make up for that but how do you guys see that playing out and what can you share there?
Maybe I can give some color here. You know we've obviously been focused on bringing this experience and making sure it works well for users and it's very clear to me first of all as a user myself that are certain queries for which the answers are so so significantly better. It's a clear quality win and so I think we are definitely headed in the right direction and we can see it in our metrics and the feedback we're getting from our users as well and the thing that doesn't change with these experiences is that many you know a lot of user journeys are commercial in nature you know they that are inherent commercial user needs and what's exciting to me is that SGE gives us an opportunity to serve those needs again better right then better so it's clearly an exciting area and as part of that the fundamentals don't change.
Users have commercial needs and they are looking for choices and there are merchants and advertisers looking to provide those choices so those fundamentals are true in SGE as well and you know we have a number of experiments in flight including ads and we are pleased with the early results we are seeing and so you know we will continue to evolve the experience but I'm comfortable at what we are seeing and we have a lot of experience working through these transitions and we'll bring all those learnings here as well.
All right thank you. Thank you. The next question comes from Justin Post of Bank of America please go ahead. Great thank you just ask about the cloud it really looks like revenue growth stabilized despite optimization so could you talk about the pipeline and the client wins in the quarter how you fell about those and then any uptick are you seeing related to AI spending in the total revenues this quarter or in the second half.
Thank you. Thanks Justin. Okay it is an exciting moment overall in cloud because there is definitely a lot of interest from customers on AI and they definitely are engaging in many more conversations with us so you know I would say you know without commenting on the short term but you know when I think about it long term I view the AI opportunity as expanding our total addressable market and allows us to win new customers you know scale of scale of investments that we can directly bring to cloud now you know as I said earlier we have over 80 models across vertex enterprise search and conversational AI and we are taking all of them translating it into deep industry solutions so you know I'm excited about it.
Second it gives us an opportunity to upsell and cross-sell into our install base so for example if you think about do a day I in Google workspace now it's a collection of all our generated AI powered collaboration features you know we can bring it and make it available to more than nine million paying Google workspace customers. Similarly do a day I in Google cloud you know is again allows us to go back to our install base and engage in deeper conversations and finally I think AI helps us differentiate our core products for example if you take a look at cybersecurity we are deeply incorporating AI to you know drive profound changes there so overall I'm excited excited and I view this as a long-term opportunity and all the investments we are doing in AI across alphabet including you know the work we are doing in Google Deep Mind and Google research on Gemini and so on are directly applicable to cloud as well so excited about it.
Great thank you maybe one follow-up for Ruth did the infrastructure cloud grow faster than workspaces again this quarter. So we we did I don't think we commented on that yes in the second quarter GCP growth was above the growth rate for cloud overall. Great thank you. Thank you the next question comes from Michael Nathanson of Moffat Nathanson please go ahead.
非常感谢,也许还有个追问,关于 Ruth 的,本季度基础设施云增长是否比工作空间快?我们是这样的,我认为我们没有评论过这一点,是的,在第二季度,GCP 的增长速度超过了整个云计算市场的增长速度。非常感谢。谢谢。下一个问题来自 Moffat Nathanson 的 Michael Nathanson,请发言。
Thanks I want to fill up one for Sundar. So if you talk about the the ad market if you step back you're seeing real size now of weakness in linear TV ad agencies small digital companies real slowing the macro backdrop something cloudy yet you guys are accelerating your growth this quarter what factors are you looking at do you see that would you know identify why are you growing while others are really struggling and slowing now and then Sundar I think you spent over a hundred billion dollars on R&D over the past five years and yet there's a narrative that it's so competitive and so expensive to compete going forward. Can you tell talk a bit about how you're visiting that R&D spend any near-term cadence updates can give us for growth and any factors that could change the growth code going forward for research and development spending for you guys. Thanks.
Maybe I can comment on the how we think about R&D and look if anything I think two things we are always committed to driving deep computer science research and innovation that's the foundation on which the company is built and taking that and applying it and building new products and services and generating value is the virtual cycle and you say nothing changes in that fundamental thesis we are definitely you know both you know as Ruth mentioned on AI investments we are going to be committed to making sure we invest to realize the opportunity but all the work we are doing on efficiency and optimization applies to on the AI side as well and so we are bringing all that lens there so that we do this responsibly but no overall changes in our philosophy our approach there and maybe a let's look comment on the overall market dynamics.
Yes look I can't comment on others but our focus continues obviously to be helping customers through whatever uncertainty or complexity they're facing and a lot of companies are focused on profitability driving efficiencies and they're carefully evaluating the effectiveness of their budgets and our goal is really to help them maximize efficiency and drive-start R&D and I think we have the proven AI power tools and solutions to actually do it I called out a search and other revenues being led by solid growth and retail vertical we talked about the DR and brand side on the YouTube side I think those are the key points I would make. Thank you.
Thank you the next question comes from Ken Gowrelski of Wells Fargo please go ahead.
谢谢,下一个问题来自富国银行的Ken Gowrelski,请发问。
Yes thank you so much for the the opportunity I appreciate that. Can I ask on performance max you've had great success there could you talk about any vertical or use case expansions and how long until we possibly get to the point of more automated AI generated creative and production. Yeah look this is a great question AI is a foundational component that really allows us to help use us advertise those pops partners at scale and we've been on journey for years right to take the key components of advertising whether it's bidding targeting and creatives as well as innovation frankly in the core advertiser and publisher experiences and improve them dramatically through AI and performance max is an example of all this comes together at scale for advertisers they provide us with business goal a set of assets and we can then take care of the rest to meet consumer demand and really deliver on advertiser or I and as you heard it at GML we've seen over many quarters we continue to build new AI features really on top of this I think I talked a bit in my prepared remarks about where we're taking some of our products from a gen AI perspective and if you take a look at some of the things we announced there it's fair to say whether you look at our revamped asset creation flow and performance max whether you look at automatically created assets whether you look at product studio and so on that we're on a right path to deliver some really exciting new innovation in automated let me call it asset creation in the broader sense thank you thank you.
Our last question comes from Mark Mahaney of Evercore please go ahead.
我们最后一个问题来自爱信的马克·马哈尼,请你提问。
Okay actually I'll follow up on that last question Phillip you know you you pointed out AI has been used to improve the advertising mousetrap at Google for you know many years do you view generative AI as just a material accelerant of your ability to return to improve return on ad spend for the millions of marketers who use Google and if you think about where generative AI would have the most impact could you could you could you feel the part of what your guests now over the next couple years where it's going to have the most impact on the creative on the audience creation on the at the campaign optimization where do you think the most impact will come from generative AI just for all the that your your advertising customers thanks well look as I said earlier generative AI is supercharging you and existing ads products with really tons of potential ahead and we're really helping advertisers here make better decisions solve problems enhance creativity and I covered this earlier for example we launched a new conversational experience in Google Ads the as a creation flow in PMACs I mentioned the automatic created assets the product studio and so on when I talk to customers they're very excited about AI and understandably have some questions one of the top questions is for example what's the next best step I should take and this is a key reason why we launched our Google Ads AI Essentials which was a big announcement at GML it's a checklist of simple steps customers can take right now to unlock the power of AI and has to do with a foundation of data and measurement it has to do with taking action with our AI product and it really is a mindset shift to set up organizations for AI success so those are just some of the examples if you extrapolate this going forward those are some of the examples where I see a lot of upside apart from the points that someone already mentioned
好的,实际上,我会对菲利普提出的最后一个问题进行跟进。你提到谷歌已经多年以来利用AI改进了广告陷阱,对于数百万使用谷歌的营销人员来说,你是否认为生成式AI只是你们提高广告支出回报能力的一种材料加速剂?如果你考虑到生成式AI将产生最大影响的领域,你能感受到它在下几年将对创意、受众创建、活动优化等方面产生最大影响吗?你认为生成式AI对于所有广告客户的影响将主要来自哪些方面?非常感谢。
嗯,正如我之前所说的,生成式AI正在为我们现有的广告产品注入巨大的潜力,并真正帮助广告商做出更好的决策、解决问题和增强创造力。例如,我们在Google Ads中推出了一种新的对话式体验,即在PMACs中的创作流程,我提到了自动生成的素材、产品工作室等。当我与客户交谈时,他们对AI非常兴奋,但也有一些问题。其中一个最重要的问题是,我应该采取下一步行动是什么,这也是我们推出Google Ads AI Essentials的核心原因。这是我们在GML上的一个重大宣布,它是一个简单步骤的清单,客户现在就可以采取这些步骤来释放AI的力量,它涉及到数据和测量的基础,涉及到与我们的AI产品采取行动,这确实是一种思维转变,为AI的成功应用建立组织结构。这些只是一些例子,如果展望未来,这些都是我看到的一些有很大潜力的地方,除了其他人已经提到的要点外。
and I think all of this is before we have a multimodal capabilities really in the mix and and so looking at the early innovations there I think it's going to be an exciting couple years ahead thanks Mark. Thank you Sundar thank you Philip congratulations Ruth. Thank you and that concludes our questioning the answer session for today I'd like to turn the conference back over to Jim Friedlin for any further remarks.