Alphabet's Other Bets, which now includes Loon and Wing alongside Waymo, Verily, and others, had Q2 revenue of $145M, with operating losses rising to $732M
Natalie Gagliordi / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
This Q2 2018 report is the earliest data point in a three-year run of Other Bets disclosures: a year later, the same segment posted an $868M quarterly loss on just $170M of revenue, and by mid-2020 the Q2 loss had reached $1.12B with revenue actually down year-over-year. The pattern across the coverage is consistent — losses scale toward $1B+ per quarter while revenue stays pinned between roughly $145M and $200M.
What makes the segment worth tracking is its composition: Waymo, Verily, Fiber, Loon and Wing are all pre-scale businesses reported as one line item, so Alphabet's moonshot portfolio is effectively priced every quarter against an advertising core that absorbs the losses.
First-order effects
- Alphabet shareholders now get a quarterly price tag on the moonshot portfolio — $732M of operating losses against $145M of revenue means the segment spends roughly five dollars for every dollar it earns.
Second-order effects
- Each unit inside Other Bets — Waymo, Verily, Loon, Wing — competes for the same pool of Alphabet capital, so persistent aggregate losses raise the bar for any single bet to prove standalone commercial traction before funding gets contested.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory in the coverage holds — losses roughly doubling from $732M toward $1.1B+ by 2020–2021 while revenue stagnates — Alphabet faces a structural choice between indefinitely subsidizing the portfolio from ads or pruning bets that never reach scale, a template other deep-pocketed tech parents running venture-style R&D arms will be measured against.
The trend: Big-tech moonshot portfolios are settling into a pattern of billion-dollar annualized-per-quarter burn with flat revenue, forcing periodic reckoning over which long-horizon bets survive.