July 23, 2026 —
Alphabet’s AI push drives 82% cloud growth and a $514 billion backlog
Today’s North America AI brief tracks the clearest signal yet that enterprise AI demand is converting into hyperscale cloud growth, alongside a major physical-AI financing, new policy pressure, and a compact radar spanning science, chips, defense computing, and developer infrastructure.
Alphabet’s AI push drives 82% cloud growth and a $514 billion backlog
Alphabet reported second-quarter revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24% year over year, while Google Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion. The company attributed the acceleration to enterprise AI infrastructure and AI solutions; Cloud operating income reached $8.8 billion, and contracted backlog climbed to $514 billion.
Usage indicators also moved sharply higher: Google said its model APIs now process about 22 billion tokens per minute, the Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise.
Atoms raises $1.7 billion to pursue industrial-scale physical AI
Travis Kalanick’s Atoms announced a $1.7 billion equity investment led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board. The company is combining its operations under one structure and pitching an industrial-AI platform that brings software, sensors, robotics, manufacturing, and physical operations together across sectors such as mining, transport, construction, and food production.
ServiceNow says its AI business crossed $1 billion in annual contract value
ServiceNow reported second-quarter subscription revenue of $3.88 billion, up 24.5% year over year, and raised its full-year subscription outlook. The company said AI products passed $1 billion in annual contract value, while agentic deployments increased ninefold over nine months. Remaining performance obligations reached $29 billion, supported by longer customer commitments and partner demand.
Washington threatens sanctions over alleged model distillation by Moonshot AI
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said sanctions and Entity List designations remain possible after White House technology officials alleged that Moonshot AI used large-scale distillation from Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3. The claim has not been independently established, and experts cited by TechCrunch questioned whether K3 could have been built primarily from a model released only weeks earlier.
Google commits $40 million in AI access to the U.S. Genesis Mission
Google DeepMind committed $40 million in AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers participating in the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission. Awardees will gain access to tools including AlphaEvolve, AlphaFold 3, AlphaGenome, WeatherNext, and AlphaEarth Foundations, while tens of thousands of national-laboratory users are slated to receive Gemini for Government access for one year.
A DGX GB300 supercomputer comes online at the Naval Postgraduate School
The on-premises system will support model training, inference, weather prediction, cybersecurity, simulation, and disaster-response research for military graduate students and faculty.
Lam highlights SABRE 3D for advanced chip packaging
The copper electroplating platform targets void-free, high-aspect-ratio interconnects for heterogeneous packages that combine accelerators, memory stacks, and specialized dies.
Claude adds a connector for Anthropic’s Economic Index
Users can query occupational, task, automation, and geographic patterns in Claude usage directly from conversations, with links back to the underlying dataset and its limitations.
Diffusers gains native Nunchaku 4-bit inference
Hugging Face says Nunchaku Lite can cut diffusion-model memory use by up to half while improving latency, with checkpoints loading through the standard Diffusers interface.
GitHub reframes Copilot pricing around models plus the agent harness
GitHub’s new comparison explains how AI Credits, BYOK, repository context, policy controls, and workflow integrations differentiate Copilot from direct model API access.