Sundar Pichai Promised a Gemini Flagship in June, and Alphabet Is on Its Worst Streak Since 2015

Sundar Pichai Promised a Gemini Flagship in June, and Alphabet Is on Its Worst Streak Since 2015

Rich Duprey

Thu, September 3, 2026 at 6:37 PM GMT+3 4 min read

• GOOG -1.11%

Quick Read

• GOOG hit its longest losing streak since 2015 after Pichai delivered Gemini 3.8 Flash instead of the promised flagship 3.5 Pro.

• A judge cleared Google from selling its ad exchange while token prices halved from peak, strengthening its integrated stack against standalone AI labs.

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Alphabet's cadence problem finally has a price tag. CEO Sundar Pichai said Gemini 3.5 Pro would arrive in June, but it still hadn't shipped as of September 2, 2026. What Google shipped instead was Gemini 3.8 Flash, a cheaper coding model, while pointing investors to Gemini 4 later in the year. That substitution has landed at the worst possible moment for the stock.

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares are "on their longest losing streak since 2015," according to CNBC's Mackenzie Sigalos, following a brief stint this spring as the world's most valuable company. The stock is down 10.39% over the past month, trading near $339.79 after opening green on Wednesday.

[chart id="GOOG"]

A Promised Flagship, a Value-Tier Delivery

On the Q2 call, Pichai stayed on message about pace. "Gemini 3.5 Pro is currently in testing and our team is already building the next generation of models," he told analysts, adding that "we have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet for Gemini 4." He framed monthly releases as strategy: "Picking up pace and releasing models, you know, almost at a monthly cadence is part of our roadmap as we are building Gemini 4 as well."

The problem is what the pace produced. The June flagship is absent. The Flash line, which Pichai called Alphabet's "workhorse model" hitting "a sweet spot of performance, cost, reliability, latency, etc.", keeps arriving on schedule.

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Fundamentals That Argue the Other Way

The financials show a company still expanding at scale. Q2 revenue rose 24.23% to $119.8 billion, EPS of $9.11 beat consensus by 199.41%, and Google Cloud grew 82% year over year to $24.8 billion with backlog at $514 billion. The Gemini App now has 950 million monthly active users, and APIs process approximately 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion a quarter ago.

The bill is steep. Capex hit $44.9 billion, free cash flow swung to negative $5.86 billion, long-term debt jumped from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion, and buybacks were suspended in Q2 2026. Even so, GOOG trades at a P/E of 14.

[company_earnings_history ticker="GOOG"]

Two Same-Day Offsets Investors Should Weigh

Two developments arrived alongside the Gemini 3.8 Flash release. First, a judge ruled that "google will not have to sell its ad exchange", removing an overhang on the ad monetization engine that Sigalos noted lets "Google compete more aggressively on price because it owns more of the stack and can monetize AI across cloud search and youtube and its ad engine." Second, token prices are "down more than half from their summer peak, squeezing standalone model labs like openai."

The accountability gap is real. So is the moat. Whether four down months mark a dip or a re-rating depends on what ships before Gemini 4, and on whether the $44.9 billion capex line keeps translating into cloud backlog rather than stranded silicon (we profiled seven suppliers riding that same buildout, from power to cooling, in a free report you can grab here).

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