Alphabet Sets October 28 for Q3 2026 Earnings, With Cash Flow in Focus
Alphabet will publish its third-quarter 2026 earnings release on October 28, 2026, on its investor relations site at abc.xyz/investor. A conference call follows the same day at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time (4:30 p.m. Eastern). The company announced the date on October 6.
The quarter's cash flow is the open question. Reuters reported on October 27 that Alphabet was expected to burn cash for a second consecutive quarter, meaning its free cash flow, the cash left after capital spending, would be negative. The figure will only be settled when the release is published.
The most recent reported quarter is the second quarter of 2026, announced on July 22. Revenue grew 24% year over year. Search & Other revenue, which covers the core search and advertising business, grew 17%. Cloud backlog, meaning signed contracts not yet recognized as revenue, reached $514 billion, according to the company's Q2 call materials.
The first quarter, reported April 29, carried the strongest growth figures in the 2026 series so far. Alphabet topped Wall Street revenue estimates, and Google Cloud grew 63%, according to Reuters. In the same report, Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure projection, which covers spending on data centers, servers and chips, to $180 billion to $190 billion. The SEC exhibit 99.1 filing for that quarter shows net income up 81%, diluted EPS (earnings per share, adjusted for potentially issued shares) up 82% to $5.11, and a 5% increase in the quarterly cash dividend to $0.22.
Earlier, Alphabet reported $97.23 billion in fourth-quarter sales excluding partner payouts, above estimates, as Bloomberg reported on February 5.
The wider market is also framed around this print. Analysts on average expected S&P 500 earnings to rise about 31% year over year in the third quarter of 2026, according to Reuters, published October 9.
In my view, the figures most worth reading closely on October 28 are not the headline revenue line. Capital expenditure guidance and free cash flow sit side by side in this cycle. A company spending at the $180 billion to $190 billion level while backlog and growth rates rise is betting on demand, and that bet will appear in depreciation, in power and data center commitments, and eventually in margins. Analysts will be looking for evidence that backlog converts into recognized revenue fast enough to justify the spending.
The broader context here is that the AI infrastructure build has moved from a question of whether to a question of how fast the returns arrive. One quarter of cash burn does not settle that. Backlog, capex and Cloud growth are the metrics that will show whether the spending is turning into revenue, and the October 28 release is the next scheduled data point on all three.
