Alphabet's stock is up over 100% over the past year, and the move is being driven by something more concrete than a market mood swing: its four-part AI strategy is starting to show results. Google Cloud is growing faster, Gemini is moving deeper into agentic workflows, and Sundar Pichai has now said the company will sell TPUs to a select group of customers for use in their own data centers.
The question behind the Google stock price search today is simple: can Alphabet turn that progress into a business that keeps widening? Investors have already pushed Nvidia to a $5 trillion market cap, and the company remains the undisputed early winner of the AI revolution, with control of 80% to 92% of the data center GPU market. That is the benchmark Alphabet is trying to challenge, even if it is not trying to fight on the same terms.
For more than a decade, Google has built custom chips for its servers and data centers, and the latest versions show how that work is being tied directly to AI demand. The TPU 8t is designed for AI training, while the TPU 8i is built for AI inference. Together with Google Cloud and Gemini AI models, they form a stack that can sell computing power, software and model access in one place. That breadth is part of why Alphabet has several distinct advantages in AI.
The numbers backing that case are stronger than they were a year ago. In the calendar first quarter, Google Cloud revenue rose 63% year over year, ahead of Amazon Web Services at 28% and Microsoft Azure at 40%. Google Cloud's backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter to $462 billion, and management expects more than half of that to convert to revenue over the next 24 months. Alphabet is not yet replacing Nvidia's grip on the hardware market, but the cloud results show that AI is already feeding a second engine of growth.
The hard part is the one Alphabet has just opened. Pichai said TPUs would be sold only to a select group of customers, which limits how quickly the company can turn a technical advantage into a new revenue stream. The market is now watching for two things: how broad that customer list becomes, and when the first sales start. If Alphabet can turn custom chips, Gemini and cloud demand into a repeatable business, the stock's jump may still be early.
