Alphabet Inc., the company best known for organizing the world’s information and occasionally losing your emails, briefly touched a $3.9 trillion market capitalization Tuesday, putting it within awkward shouting distance of Nvidia’s $4.2 trillion crown.
The search giant has added roughly one trillion dollars in value since mid-October, a sum that could fund several small nations or one very enthusiastic marketing campaign.
Wall Street traders, accustomed to treating Nvidia like the only teenager with a car, suddenly discovered the kid next door also has a license. Nvidia shares promptly fell 5.1 percent, as if someone had whispered “competition” in a crowded theater.
Meanwhile, smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices dropped 7.8 percent in sympathy, proving that in AI, when the big kids sneeze, everyone reaches for tissues.
The rally began quietly enough with glowing reviews of Alphabet’s Gemini AI model, which apparently convinced investors that Google can, in fact, finish a project.
Shares climbed 2 percent in regular trading, pushing the market cap to levels that make even seasoned analysts reach for stronger coffee.
One particularly juicy rumor has Meta Platforms in talks to use Google’s tensor processing units in its data centers as early as 2027, with possible rentals starting next year.
If confirmed, Meta—currently one of the planet’s most enthusiastic buyers of anything with a plug—would be handing Google a golden ticket labeled “We also do hardware now.”
Analysts note this would elevate Google’s TPUs from “nice try” to legitimate rival of Nvidia’s near-monopoly on AI accelerators.
Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings ratio has politely retreated to 26, a humble figure compared with its decade-long average of 35.
Alphabet, meanwhile, now trades at 27 times forward earnings—having apparently decided that being undervalued was so last quarter.
Technical charts show Alphabet’s 14-day relative strength index at 75, well above the traditional “please calm down” threshold of 70.
Matthew Maley of Miller Tabak warns the stock is “more than just a little bit overbought,” which in market speak means the elevator may have overshot the penthouse.
Yet investment director Alexandra Morris observes that the old bedtime story—“Nvidia is the only one with the magic chips”—no longer puts anyone to sleep.
Investors are instead wide awake, recalculating which Silicon Valley giant gets to sit at the head of the trillion-dollar table.
For now, Alphabet trails Nvidia by a mere $300 billion, a gap roughly equivalent to the GDP of Portugal or three failed metaverse initiatives.
Whether Google’s TPUs can match Nvidia’s raw efficiency remains the question keeping data-center architects up at night.
Until then, the market appears content to reward Alphabet for finally convincing the world it can build something faster than another abandoned messaging app.
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