Reported market estimates for Tuesday morning, May 5, put Alphabet’s market value at about $4.67 trillion, compared with $4.79 trillion for Nvidia. Those estimates showed Nvidia still ahead of Alphabet as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company.
Reported share-performance figures put Alphabet’s gain in 2026 at about 24%, compared with roughly 7% for Nvidia.
Alphabet briefly held the leading market-value position in February 2016 before Apple reclaimed it.
Cloud growth and capital spending
Alphabet reported on April 29 that Google Cloud revenue increased 63% year over year to $20 billion in the first quarter ended March 31. The company attributed the increase to growth in enterprise AI solutions, AI infrastructure and core Google Cloud Platform services.
Analysts’ average growth forecast was 50.1%, in reported consensus figures compiled by LSEG. For the same quarter, Amazon reported that AWS sales increased 28% to $37.6 billion, while Microsoft reported 40% growth in Azure and other cloud services revenue. These figures cover different business groupings.
Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, pointed to large cloud operators’ capital spending and early signs of improved AI monetization, particularly at Alphabet.
On Alphabet’s April 29 earnings call, chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi forecast capital expenditures of $180 billion to $190 billion for 2026. The guidance included investment related to the acquisition of Intersect, which closed in March.
Custom processors and customer agreements
Alongside its cloud services, Gemini models and business AI software, Google develops custom AI processors known as TPUs.
CEO Sundar Pichai said on April 29 that Google would begin delivering TPU hardware to selected customers for use in their own data centers. Ashkenazi said Alphabet expected to recognize a small percentage of revenue from those agreements later in 2026, with the vast majority in 2027.
Anthropic is an existing user of Google’s processors. On October 23, 2025, it announced plans to expand its use of Google Cloud technologies to include up to one million TPUs. Anthropic said the expansion was worth tens of billions of dollars and was expected to bring well over a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.
On April 6, 2026, Anthropic announced a further agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, expected to begin coming online in 2027. Anthropic said it trained and ran Claude on Google TPUs, Amazon Trainium chips and Nvidia GPUs, while Amazon remained its primary cloud provider and training partner.
Earnings valuations
Valuation figures reported on May 5 put Alphabet at about 29 times expected earnings over the following 12 months, above its five-year average of 22. Nvidia and the S&P 500 were each listed at roughly 21 times forward earnings.
