Alphabet Narrows Gap to Nvidia at $4.8T Market Cap

Alphabet has narrowed the gap with Nvidia to become the world's most valuable company, fueled by a sharp rally in its stock amid growing strength in artificial intelligence.

As of last Friday, Alphabet's market capitalization stood at $4.8 trillion, while Nvidia's reached $5.2 trillion following a three-day rally. Six months earlier, on October 31, Nvidia held a $4.9 trillion valuation compared to Alphabet's $3.4 trillion. Over that period, Alphabet shares surged 43 percent, including a 34 percent gain in April, its best monthly performance since 2004. Nvidia's stock rose just 6.3 percent, underperforming the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes. Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia in after-hours trading earlier this week.

Analysts attribute Alphabet's momentum to its diversified presence across the AI ecosystem, including Google Search, Google Cloud, YouTube, Waymo, its Gemini AI model and a significant stake in Anthropic, developer of the Claude AI model. The company also produces tensor processing unit chips, or TPUs, for AI workloads. Alphabet reported stronger-than-expected growth in search and cloud during recent earnings, with TPUs drawing customer interest. One projection...