Google parent Alphabet could soon reach a market capitalization of $2 trillion dollars — thanks to its innovation with generative artificial intelligence. The tech giant’s stock was the market’s star performer on Thursday, as Alphabet Class A shares and Alphabet Class C shares each hit new 52-week highs, gaining 1.8% and 1.7%, respectively.
Alphabet stock is up more than 15% so far this year, and more than 51% over the last 12 months. The company’s market capitalization was sitting at $1.99 trillion on Thursday afternoon.
Earlier this week, Google unveiled its latest cloud and artificial intelligence innovations, including a new AI chip to compete with semiconductor giant Nvidia and an Arm-based CPU to challenge Microsoft and Amazon.
The tech giant’s latest AI chip, the Cloud TPU v5p, was first announced in December, the same day as its AI chatbot Gemini. The new TPU, or tensor processing unit, can train so-called large language models almost three times faster than its predecessor, Google’s TPU v4, the company said. Large language models (LLMs) power AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
“Now in their fifth generation, these advancements [to Google’s TPUs] have helped customers train and serve cutting edge language models,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the company’s annual Google Cloud Next conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Google’s announcement was the latest salvo in Big Tech’s AI arms race.
Nvidia is the main supplier of the AI chips known as GPUs, or graphics processing units. And Google parent Alphabet is one of Nvidia’s biggest customers, behind Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta. All are increasingly developing their own AI hardware to be less reliant on Nvidia.
-Laura Bratton contributed to the article.