Alphabet Nears Nvidia as World’s Most Valuable Company on AI Rally

Alphabet stood on the brink of reclaiming the top spot among global companies on Tuesday, closing in on Nvidia by a margin that had narrowed to about $120 billion as investors kept piling into artificial intelligence winners.

Nvidia’s market value was about $4.79 trillion, while Alphabet’s stood near $4.67 trillion, a gap that was small enough to turn a market-cap race into a referendum on where the next phase of the AI boom will pay off. If Alphabet passes Nvidia, it would be back at No. 1 for the first time since February 2016, when Apple retook the crown.

The surge has been powered by Alphabet’s latest earnings and by a deeper shift in investor preference. Money is no longer chasing only the firms that sell the shovels for the AI rush, such as advanced chips; it is also moving toward the companies with cloud infrastructure, distribution and software platforms that can turn AI demand into recurring revenue. Stephanie Link of Hightower Advisors said the move reflected hyperscaler capital spending and clearer signs of monetization, especially for Alphabet, compared with the broader AI supply chain that includes data centers, power and grid capacity.

Alphabet’s April 29 first-quarter results gave that argument fresh fuel. Revenue rose 22% from a year earlier to $109.9 billion, while net income jumped 81% to $62.6 billion. Google Cloud was the standout: revenue climbed 63% to more than $20 billion for the first time, and the cloud backlog nearly doubled from the prior quarter to about $462 billion.

Sundar Pichai said enterprise AI solutions had become Google Cloud’s primary growth driver for the first time, and Alphabet said revenue from products built on its generative AI models grew nearly 800% from a year earlier. The company also raised its 2026 capital-expenditure outlook to as much as $190 billion, signaling that it intends to keep spending heavily on the infrastructure that supports AI services.

That combination of growth, scale and spending has made Alphabet look less like a latecomer in the AI race and more like a central beneficiary of it. Nvidia remains the dominant hardware supplier, but Alphabet is increasingly being valued as a platform company with several ways to profit from AI, including search, cloud, Gemini-powered products and custom silicon. For investors, the race at the top now says as much about monetization as it does about technology.