Alphabet Doubles Down On Waymo And Gemini Enterprise AI Bets
- Finance
ThePostMaster- 0
- 8 minutes read
Make better investment decisions with Simply Wall St’s easy, visual tools that give you a competitive edge.
Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous driving unit, secured a record US$16b funding round backed by Alphabet and external investors.
The capital is intended to support an international robotaxi expansion into more than 20 new cities, including London and Tokyo.
Separately, Google Cloud agreed a five year partnership to deploy Gemini AI models across Liberty Global’s European cable and telecom operations.
For Alphabet (NasdaqGS:GOOGL), these moves sit at the intersection of two core businesses: autonomous mobility and cloud based AI services. Waymo’s new funding reflects a long term push to commercialize self driving technology at scale, while the Liberty Global deal positions Gemini at the center of large telecom and media workloads in Europe.
As a shareholder or prospective investor, you are seeing Alphabet commit substantial resources to capital intensive bets alongside multi year enterprise AI agreements. The rest of this article looks at how these developments fit with Alphabet’s broader mix of businesses, potential risks, and what they could mean for the company’s exposure to autonomous transport and AI infrastructure.
Stay updated on the most important news stories for Alphabet by adding it to your watchlist or portfolio. Alternatively, explore our Community to discover new perspectives on Alphabet.
Why Alphabet could be great value
Waymo’s US$16b round, most of it from Alphabet, signals that the parent company is keeping autonomous mobility as a long-term, capital-intensive priority while still welcoming external validation from funds like Sequoia and DST. At the same time, the Gemini rollout across Liberty Global’s European network shows Google Cloud using contract-specific AI deployments to deepen ties with a major telecom customer and potentially lock in workloads that might otherwise go to Amazon or Microsoft.
These updates line up closely with existing community narratives that see Alphabet as using AI to support both its core search and cloud franchises while treating bets like Waymo as potential future growth engines rather than short-term profit centers. The Liberty Global agreement is also consistent with the view that AI-powered tools inside Google Cloud can build on its existing enterprise base instead of relying only on consumer-facing Gemini apps.
Waymo’s US$126b valuation and large round make the unit a more visible asset inside Alphabet, which some investors have wanted instead of it being buried in “Other Bets.”
A five-year Gemini rollout across Liberty Global’s footprint supports the thesis that Google Cloud can win contract-specific AI deals against Amazon and Microsoft.
The capital commitment to Waymo is sizable, and federal safety investigations plus tighter auto regulation could affect the timing and scale of robotaxi rollouts.
AI-related contracts in Europe sit against a backdrop of evolving digital and antitrust rules, which could influence how aggressively Alphabet can use and monetize telecom data.
