Alphabet (GOOGL) stock is up ove 70% YTD, rebounding from a sluggish end to 2025, and is now closing in on Nvidia in the Market Capitalization race. Its 4.6T market cap is now just under $200B away from AI darling Nvidia, and the climb in recent weeks has outpaced NVDA as well.
GOOGL’s climb on Tuesda is attributed to a new joint deal with Microsoft and xAI. Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft and xAI have reached an agreement with the Trump administration to share early versions of their artificial-intelligence programs to assess their capabilities and security before releasing the models to the public. The Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation will lead evaluations of the AI programs. The center has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on models that remain unreleased. ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Anthropic reached a similar agreement with the Commerce Department in 2024.
Wall Street strongly believes that Alphabet’s ATH surge of late isn’t going to end anytime soon. Further, its push to $5T market cap isn’t impossible. Google (GOOGL) beat Q1 earnings with $109.9B in revenue (up 22% YoY) and $5.11 EPS versus $2.63 consensus, while Google Cloud surged 63% to $20B with a backlog nearly doubling to $460B, supporting a $502.88 price target with 31% upside. Google’s accelerating cloud growth backed by a $460B backlog and 60% surge in Gemini API usage offsets concerns about CapEx doubling to $35.7B in Q1, as management deploys capital directly into AI capacity and cloud infrastructure. The solid earnings and Alphabet’s forecast for revenue in 2026 are both bullish cases for GOOGL stock to soar.
Also Read: Google Stock is JP Morgan’s Top Overall Pick: See New Price Target
Right now, the GOOGL analyst rating from 72 analysts sits at strong buy, and the Alphabet stock forecast is getting more bullish. Most recently, JP Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth moved his price target from $395 to $460 following Alphabet’s earnings beat. That implies roughly 20% upside from current levels. Anmuth wrote that Alphabet has moved beyond the experimental phase in AI. The Gemini API is now processing over 16 billion tokens per minute, a sign the company is converting its AI investment into real revenue. JP Morgan’s view is that Google has successfully turned infrastructure spending into a business. That’s a shift in the narrative that has kept some investors on the sidelines.
Pivotal Research also raised its GOOGL target, moving it to $470. That puts two major firms with targets well above where the stock trades today. Pivotal Research pointed to several Q1 numbers that came in ahead of its own estimates. Search revenue growth accelerated for the fifth consecutive quarter, hitting 19% year-over-year, which also beat Pivotal’s estimate of 15%. Cloud revenue grew 63%, topping the firm’s 48% estimate, marking the fourth straight quarter of acceleration there. Subscriptions and Devices revenue also grew 19% in the period. On the back of those numbers, Pivotal revised its forecasts for both search and cloud revenue upward, and also bumped its capital expenditure estimates