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Alphabet is no stranger to outsized investment cycles, but its latest capital expenditure plans signal something more structural.
With projected spending of between $175bn and $185bn in 2026, Alphabet is positioning artificial intelligence not as a feature upgrade, but as core infrastructure underpinning commerce, cloud services and enterprise software.
AI demand forces a step-change in investment
How Alphabet is building agentic commerce
Management framed the spending increase less as a strategic gamble than as a response to physical constraint.
Speaking on the company’s latest earnings call, chief executive Sundar Pichai said Alphabet remains supply-constrained even as it rapidly expands capacity.
Training advanced models, running inference at scale and supporting enterprise workloads are all competing for limited compute resources.
The numbers underline the pressure. Gemini now processes more than 10 billion tokens per minute via APIs, while the Gemini app has reached roughly 750 million monthly active users.
On the enterprise side, more than eight million paid Gemini Enterprise seats have been sold in just four months, signalling how quickly AI is embedding itself into business workflows.
Google Cloud backlog has climbed to $240bn, reinforcing the view that demand is running ahead of deployable capacity.
Agentic commerce moves closer to the checkout
Perhaps the most consequential development for the payments industry is Alphabet’s progress on agentic commerce.
After spending much of 2025 laying protocol foundations, the company is now integrating shopping and checkout capabilities directly into Search, Ads and Gemini experiences.
The implication is a tighter loop between discovery and transaction.
Consumers will be able to move from conversational search to purchase without leaving Alphabet’s surfaces, while merchants gain access to new checkout flows embedded in AI-driven interfaces.
Early monetisation is already visible, with direct offers appearing beneath AI responses and advertisers using Gemini to generate creative assets at scale.
Gemini becomes an operating layer
A notable shift in Alphabet’s messaging is how Gemini is now positioned. Rather than being framed as a discrete product, it is increasingly described as an enabling layer across software ecosystems.
Over 120,000 organisations already use Gemini, and Alphabet says the vast majority of leading software-as-a-service providers have integrated it into their platforms.
For payments and commerce, this matters. When AI becomes embedded in core workflows — from product discovery to fulfilment — it begins to shape how transactions are initiated, authorised and completed.
Gemini’s expansion into enterprise systems suggests that AI-driven decisioning and automation will increasingly sit upstream of payment flows.
Ecosystem reach and execution risk
Alphabet’s confirmation of deeper collaboration with Apple, including joint work on Gemini-based foundation models, further extends its reach across devices and platforms.
For merchants and payment providers, that breadth increases the likelihood that agentic commerce becomes a mainstream channel rather than an experimental add-on.
The constraint, however, remains execution.
Power availability, data centre build-outs and hardware lead times will determine how quickly Alphabet can translate demand into live services.
Yet the strategic direction is clear: AI is no longer an overlay on commerce. For Alphabet, it is becoming the infrastructure through which future transactions will flow.
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