Google’s new CFO makes earnings call debut, says company can ‘push a little further’ on cost cuts
Alphabet incoming CFO Anat Ashkenazi, who spent 23 years at Eli Lilly
Eli Lilly
For nine years, the CFO role at Google and parent company Alphabet was held by Ruth Porat, who took a giant pay package in 2015 to leave Wall Street for Silicon Valley.
On Tuesday, Porat’s successor, Anat Ashkenazi, made her earnings call debut, and said one of her top priorities will be to drive more “cost efficiencies” across the company, an effort started by her predecessor and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
“There’s really good work that was done, started by Ruth, Sundar and the rest of the lead team to re-engineer the cost base,” Ashkenazi, who previously spent 23 years at drugmaker Eli Lilly, said on the call. “But I think any organization can always push a little further and I’ll be looking at additional opportunities.”
Ashkenazi joined Alphabet in July, almost a year after the company announced that Porat would move into a new role as president and chief investment officer. Her appearance on Tuesday came after Alphabet reported third-quarter earnings that beat on top and bottom lines, driven by strong revenue growth from the company’s search and cloud units.
Alphabet shares, up 21% for the year, rose another 5.8% in extended trading after the report.
The company is fighting to maintain its dominance in search advertising as artificial intelligence upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity grow in popularity. There’s also TikTok, which recently allowed brands to target ads based on search queries, and Amazon and Meta, which are developing conversational AI tools.
To adjust to the changing competitive landscape and an altered economy, Google has made cuts and initiated internal shakeups. Ashkenazi said one of her priorities is to look across the organization for “further efficiencies” so the company can invest in new areas and maintain its competitive edge and margins.
Alphabet reported $13 billion in capital expenditures in the third quarter, and Ashkenazi said she expects the same level of spending in the fourth. The majority went to technical infrastructure, including servers and data center equipment that power cloud and AI products, Ashkenazi said on the call.
Cloud is a top area that “requires investment,” she added, pointing to the need to scale AI products.
Ashkenazi warned the company will be making higher capital expenditure in 2025, echoing Pichai who, referring to search and coud, said “there is an aggressive roadmap ahead for 2025.” Askenazi said the investments are based on demand from customers so it “will translate to revenue in the fairly short term.”
Meanwhile, she and the leadership team will continue cutting costs across the company to “try and offset some of these” investments.
During the Q&A portion of the call, Evercore ISI’s Mark Mahaney asked, “As you’re coming in looking at this fresh, is it clear to you there are a lot of newfound cost efficiencies or ongoing cost efficiencies?”
Ashkenazi responded by saying that in the latest period, earnings were boosted by “headcount management, facilities management, other process efficiencies,” and that there’s “more to come.”
The new CFO said one way Google can find additional efficiencies is by using AI “within our own processes and how we get work done.”
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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