Google’s parent company, Alphabet, smashed its piggy-bank to spend $7.7bn on capital investments in the first quarter of 2018, up from $2.4bn year-over-year. The spending is concentrated on what Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the “big three areas” for the company – cloud technologies, consumer devices and YouTube. In the first two, Google has significant ground to make up, to chase rivals like Amazon AWS in cloud and Apple and Samsung in devices. Other investments are going on Google data centers, as well as investments in R&D and engineering personnel, sales and marketing and more, to drive future growth. Alphabet increased R&D spend by more than $1bn to just over $5bn during Q1. Alphabet reported $31.1bn revenues for the first quarter…