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by casualscience 24 days ago
How are the Google numbers calculated? I've seen their net income increasing a lot as they've rolled out Gemini. This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable.

Yet this site suggests that tokens are very unprofitable
4 comments
missedthecue 24 days ago
The site doesn't suggest anything useful. It's more of a fun meme.

Building a datacenter that will produce hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tokens over a multi-decade life shouldn't surprise anyone that it's in the red in year 1 or 2. There's a lot of front loaded capex in this business. If someone built a tractor factory you wouldnt expect 1 year payback.

But the site sort of implies that these companies are selling tokens for less than it takes to inference them. As if this is some sort of COGS ledger. Especially by throwing Nvidia in there. Don't take it too seriously.

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girvo 24 days ago
> This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable.

Out of all the companies, considering their own silicon etc. I wouldn't be surprised. Though I do wonder in terms of total CapEx and R&D where it would be at...

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crowbahr 24 days ago
Google is making money on selling cloud compute. Their margins have gone from 9% to 32%.

They're soaking up the investor bonanza into AI - Gemini ain't making them money.

For context Cloud Compute made 20bn in Q1, Other services made 90bn.

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casualscience 24 days ago
Search, yt, etc.. are the real revenue sources for Google. But they are serving [3.2 quadrillion tokens per month](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/sundar-pichai-io-2026/...) and have ramped up a ton in 2026, yet profits continue to expand.

Comparing to ad revenue from a company like meta, the story that Gemini tokens are a strong cash drag on Google just doesn't add up. It seems at worst they are losing like 50 cents/1M tokens (including r&d spend, data centers, etc..), and very possible they are actually profitable per token.

Which is much better than anthropic and openai.

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nothercastle 24 days ago
I mean yes they are serving ads off websites they Plagiarized with AI. So if you use ai to serve up content you don’t own as your property then perhaps you can make money. The cost is that they are completely killing the creators
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