Sundar Pichai’s big bet begins to pay off, and YouTube may soon fall behind
Once seen as a distant third in the cloud wars, Google Cloud has quietly become one of Alphabet’s fastest-growing businesses, fuelled by the AI boom and CEO Sundar Pichai’s long-term vision. What was once considered a costly experiment is now threatening to overtake YouTube as Alphabet’s second-largest revenue engine after Search.
Alphabet reported $15 billion in cloud revenue for the third quarter of 2025, up 34% year-on-year, driven by demand for AI infrastructure, data centres and Google’s in-house Gemini AI model.
