Wall Street has another funny turn over Alphabet's plans to ramp up spending to further boost cloud successes. Who is going to teach the red braces brigade about the math of investing in the future?

Google Cloud turned in another strong quarter to end its current fiscal year, but Wall Street had its by now customary and increasingly tedious fit of the vapors as the firm’s parent Alphabet confirmed plans to increase data center build-out spend dramatically over the next 12 months.

Total Q4 Alphabet revenue was up 18% year-on-year to $113.83 billion, with net income of $34.45 billion. Google Cloud revenue soared 48% year-on-year to $17.66 billion, an annual run-rate of north of $70 billion, with its year end order back log topping $240 billion, up 55% year-on-year.

But the firm’s investment plans, alluded to back in October, scared the investor horses as the estimated range of between $175 billion and $185 billion is more than double total CapEx spend in 2025. And most of that will be going on AI compute infrastructure to meet customer demand, according to ...