Key Points
- Alphabet's Other Bets segment drew attention after Wing expanded drone delivery to seven more U.S. cities and Waymo launched its first membership program in the same week.
- Waymo's new $29.99-per-month Premier program introduces recurring revenue to a ride business already generating approximately 500,000 paid trips per week.
- Despite a $2.1 billion operating loss, Other Bets holds significant embedded value, with Waymo's private valuation alone standing at $126 billion.
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As Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) continues to dominate headlines with Google Cloud's acceleration, Gemini's progress, and its massive AI infrastructure buildout, one segment of the company rarely gets mentioned: Other Bets. It is home to Alphabet's moonshot ventures, experimental projects that do not yet contribute materially to earnings but have the potential to reshape entire industries.
And this past week, two of those bets delivered news suggesting the segment deserves far more investor attention than it gets.
Wing Is Quietly Becoming a Real Business
On June 8, Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery subsidiary, announced an expansion into seven more U.S. cities through its partnership with Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT).
The new markets include Memphis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Salt Lake City, bringing the combined service footprint to nearly 20 U.S. markets.
The expansion is part of a broader plan to build a drone delivery network spanning more than 270 Walmart locations by next year, reaching over 40 million Americans, or roughly 10% of the U.S. population.
The numbers behind the program suggest this is no longer an experiment. Wing has completed over one million commercial deliveries. Its drones fly at up to 60 mph and deliver within roughly 30 minutes. And according to the company, its top 25% of customers are using the service three times a week. That is habitual, repeat usage, the exact kind of engagement that turns a novelty into a durable business.
Notably, Alphabet recently tied a portion of CEO Sundar Pichai's compensation to performance at Wing and Waymo for the first time, a clear signal that these ventures are now expected to deliver.
Waymo Adds a Recurring Revenue Layer
One day later, on June 11, Waymo introduced its first-ever membership program. Waymo Premier, a $29.99-per-month, invite-only tier, offers priority pickups, 10% cash back on every trip in the form of ride credits, early access to new cities, and up to 5 free cancellations per month. The program is launching initially in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Waymo's three longest-running markets, with tens of thousands of invitations going out to the service's most frequent riders.
The membership move matters because of what it signals about scale. Waymo has doubled its paid rides to approximately 500,000 per week in less than a year and is targeting one million weekly trips by year-end. The company raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation earlier this year to fund expansion into more than 20 cities, including its first international markets in Tokyo and London.
For context, Uber's (NYSE: UBER) comparable membership program, Uber One, reached 50 million members and drove half of the company's gross bookings in the first quarter. If Waymo Premier follows even a fraction of that trajectory, it adds a recurring revenue layer on top of a ride business that is already compounding rapidly.
The Segment Is Still a Loss-Maker, But That Is the Point
To be clear, Other Bets remains deeply unprofitable. In Q1 2026, the segment generated $411 million in revenue against an operating loss of $2.1 billion. For a company that generated $132 billion in net income in 2025 and roughly $160 billion in net income over the trailing 12 months, that loss is easily absorbed. But it underscores why the market assigns little to no value to the segment within Alphabet's almost $4.3 trillion market cap. That is precisely what makes it interesting. Waymo alone carries a private valuation of $126 billion, and the optionality embedded in Wing's commercial scaling is effectively free at current prices.
The Bigger Picture for GOOGL
The stock, up about 15% year-to-date, has seen recent price action that is especially interesting. GOOGL has fallen over 10% from its recent 52-week high, and briefly broke below key support near $357 on June 11.
What stands out is the close from June 11. Having broken below major short-term support, the stock reclaimed that level and closed back in the range. That’s a potentially extremely bullish close and technical pattern, signaling the bulls have re-entered the fray and taken back control. If GOOGL can push back toward the short-term resistance near $372, a higher low might be all but confirmed.
Shifting gears back to the fundamentals, the core Alphabet thesis for investors remains anchored in Search, Cloud, and AI. But weeks like this one are a reminder that the company is also incubating businesses that could matter enormously over the next decade.
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