Catenaa, Sunday, May 10, 2026- Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia by market cap in after-hours trading this week, with its stock surging about 160% over the past year as it became a well-positioned AI company.
The stock was driven higher by an emerging view on Wall Street that Google is well-positioned across the AI landscape, whether it’s from the company’s homegrown models, its massive distribution network, or its cloud unit, which is reeling in cash from other booming AI businesses.
Among tech’s seven other trillion-dollar companies in the US, chip designer Broadcom is the
next best performer over the past 12 months, with its stock up 107%.
The other company he put in that category is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with xAI in February in a deal valued at $1.75 trillion.
Following Alphabet’s earnings report last week, JPMorgan analysts called the stock their “top overall pick” in the tech sector, pointing to a “standout quarter,” accelerating growth, and a cloud backlog that nearly doubled to $462 billion.
Mizuho analysts raised their price target, writing that consensus estimates still significantly underestimate Google Cloud revenue and operating income over the next two years.
Alphabet closed the week with a market cap of $4.8 trillion, behind only Nvidia at $5.2 trillion.
The two flip-flopped momentarily after markets closed on Tuesday following a report that AI model developer Anthropic committed to spending $200 billion on Google Cloud over five years for 5 gigawatts of compute.
For investors, it was the latest sign that Google has many ways to make money and compete at the cutting edge.
There’s Gemini and DeepMind for AI models and research, Google Cloud for compute, tensor processing units (TPUs) as an alternative to Nvidia, and the ability to add AI features into search, YouTube, and Android.
A primary area of concern is how much of the backlog could be coming from Anthropic, a cash-burning and richly valued startup that’s raising tens of billions of dollars from Google and, in turn, is spending much of that money with Google on cloud services and TPUs.
If the reported $200 billion Anthropic commitment is measured against Alphabet’s reported cloud backlog, it could represent more than 40% of future contracted revenue.
Mizuho estimates roughly $61 billion of Google’s cloud backlog through 2027 could come from sales of its TPUs, and most of that revenue will likely be recognized next year.
That gives investors looking for an alternative to Nvidia another way to buy the AI hardware trade, a theme that’s swept across Wall Street of late, with shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, and Micron all more than doubling this year.
