Alphabet’s 160% Rally in One Year

Alphabet’s shares have surged roughly 160% over the past year, briefly pushing the company past Nvidia by market capitalisation in after-hours trading this week, CNBC reported Sunday. The move reflects a dramatic reversal in how investors view Google’s parent company inside the AI race.

From Skeptic to Top Pick

Wall Street’s tone on Alphabet has shifted sharply. Analysts at JPMorgan named the stock their top overall pick across the tech sector following last week’s earnings. They cited accelerating revenue growth and a cloud backlog that nearly doubled to $462 billion. Mizuho analysts also raised their price target, arguing that consensus estimates still materially undervalue Google Cloud’s earnings potential over the next two years. Alphabet ended the week at a $4.8 trillion market cap, trailing only Nvidia’s $5.2 trillion.

What “Owning the Stack” Actually Means

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, told CNBC that Google is one of just two companies truly positioned to win across every layer of AI. “They own most of the stack,” he said. “Chips, models, infrastructure and distribution. On top of that, they’re nicely profitable.” That stack spans the Gemini and DeepMind model families, Google Cloud for compute, proprietary tensor processing units as an alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs, and existing distribution through Search, YouTube, and Android. The only other company Munster placed in the same category was Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier this year in a deal valued at $1.75 trillion.

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The Anthropic Question — and an Oracle Parallel

Not everyone is purely bullish. A key concern centres on concentration risk inside that surging backlog. AI developer Anthropic reportedly committed $200 billion in Google Cloud spending over five years, covering 5 gigawatts of compute. If accurate, that single deal could represent more than 40% of Alphabet’s entire contracted cloud revenue. Analyst Gil Luria at D.A. Davidson drew a parallel to Oracle, whose stock soared in late 2024 after a backlog jump that later proved heavily tied to OpenAI alone. Luria said Alphabet disclosed the backlog doubling without specifying how much came from the Anthropic arrangement, a pattern he found familiar. Anthropic is itself largely funded by Google, meaning a portion of capital flows directly back to Google Cloud as spending.

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What Comes Next for Alphabet Investors

The market cap gap between Alphabet and Nvidia has narrowed considerably in 2026. Among the other US mega-cap tech names, chipmaker Broadcom is the second-best performer over twelve months, with shares up roughly 107%. Alphabet’s multi-layer AI positioning gives it several separate revenue levers. Whether the backlog concentration becomes a liability depends heavily on Anthropic’s own growth trajectory.

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