Google Says Gemini Reached 950 Million Monthly Users as Cash Flow Turned Negative

Alphabet said Wednesday that the Gemini app had reached 950 million monthly active users. The same quarter produced Alphabet’s first negative free cash flow since it went public in 2004, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The Gemini app’s 950 million users

The Verge reported that Google had disclosed 750 million Gemini users in February. Business Insider reported that the app had more than 750 million monthly users earlier this year and about 650 million last October. Business Insider put ChatGPT at roughly 1 billion monthly users.

CEO Sundar Pichai said that daily active users of the Gemini app had tripled over the past year.

Alphabet disclosed two other measures of Gemini distribution. Its models process 22 billion API tokens per minute, and nearly 90% of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini Enterprise. Pre-earnings reporting put the service’s starting price at $21 per person per month.

Alphabet’s first negative free cash flow

Alphabet recorded $44.9 billion in capital expenditures during the quarter, and CFO Anat Ashkenazi told analysts that most of that spending went to technical infrastructure. Free cash flow was negative $5.9 billion, its first negative quarter since Alphabet went public in 2004, according to Dow Jones Market Data cited by MarketWatch. The company had generated almost $25 billion in free cash flow a year earlier, CNBC reported. Ashkenazi attributed the quarterly deficit to capital investment.

Quarterly revenue at Alphabet reached $119.8 billion, up 24% from a year earlier, while Google Cloud revenue rose 82% to $24.8 billion.

On the call, Ashkenazi raised Alphabet’s 2026 capital-spending forecast to between $195 billion and $205 billion. The previous range, set in April, was $180 billion to $190 billion. She added that the company would keep investing as long as it saw an attractive return. Thomas Monteiro of Investing.com said that “capital has a real cost again” and that the room for error was narrowing each quarter.

Ashkenazi called Google supply-constrained. About 60% of its infrastructure spending in the quarter went to AI servers, with the remainder allocated to data centers and networking equipment. The company planned to use more third-party cloud capacity during its own buildout, a choice that would create modest near-term margin pressure but allow Google to serve more customers, according to Ashkenazi. Mizuho analysts called the capex increase broadly anticipated and described the overall story as positive, largely because of the surge in cloud revenue. The analysts, who recommend buying the stock, wrote that they expected Alphabet shares to recover when regular trading resumed. Alphabet shares fell more than 3% in after-hours trading, to about $327.40 after closing at $341.91.

Analysts question Gemini 3.5 Pro

Gemini 3.5 Pro had been slated for June but remained in partner testing when Alphabet released its results. On the call, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked whether Gemini could stay competitive at the industry’s leading edge and cited Google’s slower model releases. Bloomberg News reported July 16 that the setback had worried some Google engineers, AI researchers and managers, citing 10 current and former employees. The same report said that results fell short of internal goals and that Google updated Gemini’s training data late in June to improve coding. A Google spokesperson said that 3.5 Pro, an upgraded Flash model and other models were being tested with partners. Pichai replied that there were “many attributes on which we are still at the frontier,” then acknowledged that coding and agentic coding were areas where Google needed to improve.

Pichai repeatedly pointed to Gemini Flash. He cited Gemini 3.6 Flash, released this week, which Google said had improved by more than 10 points on a coding benchmark compared with the previous version while using fewer tokens. Google had also unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and a cybersecurity-focused Flash Cyber model the day before the earnings call.

Gemini 4 enters training

Barclays analyst Ross Sandler also questioned the release pace. Pichai called Gemini 4 a “very ambitious effort.” He noted that Google was applying “a lot of our compute and effort” to the new generation. Training has begun on Gemini 4, Pichai disclosed, and its roadmap calls for model releases “almost at a monthly cadence.”

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai