Monday marked another milestone for the US technology sector, as Alphabet (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US), the parent company of Google, saw its shares climb 1%, propelling its market capitalization to breach the $4 trillion mark for the first time in history, joining an exclusive group of publicly traded companies to achieve this scale. With this achievement, Alphabet now stands alongside NVIDIA (NVDA.US), Apple (AAPL.US), and Microsoft (MSFT.US) as one of only four companies globally to have ever crossed the $4 trillion valuation threshold. It is noteworthy that, besides Alphabet, only NVIDIA currently maintains a market cap above the $4 trillion level. Alphabet's stock closed at $331.86 on Monday. The immediate catalyst for the share price increase is widely believed to be the company's significant collaboration with Apple in the field of artificial intelligence. In a joint statement, Apple and Google announced that the next-generation Apple Foundation Models will be built upon Google's Gemini model and its cloud computing technology, and will be used to power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri voice assistant. The release date for the new version of Siri has been postponed until later this year. Looking back over the past 12 months, Alphabet's stock performance has been a rollercoaster. On April 8th of last year, the stock hit a 52-week closing low of $144.7, partly due to a global market sell-off triggered by former US President Donald Trump's announcement of "Liberation Day" tariff policies on April 2nd. Simultaneously, concerns over potential remedies from an antitrust trial and fears that competing AI chatbots were eroding its share in the search market also weighed heavily on Alphabet. However, investor confidence gradually recovered as the antitrust ruling proved milder than initially feared, research data indicated strong performance for Alphabet's AI models, and data related to Google's search business continued to show positive trends. Bolstered by these factors, Alphabet's stock staged a powerful rebound, recording a cumulative gain of 66% for the full year 2025.
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