William O’Neil has reinstated Alphabet with a Buy rating, giving the stock a fresh vote of confidence even as no price target came with the call. The move lands with Alphabet shares flat year-to-date and trading near $312, a level that leaves the google stock price below the analyst consensus target of $376.29.
The new rating arrives after a year in which Alphabet kept stacking up reasons for bulls to stay involved. Wall Street now has 61 Buy or Strong Buy ratings on the company and zero Sell ratings, a rare show of agreement around a stock that has been underpinned by Search, Cloud and a growing AI story. Investors are still being asked to judge whether that optimism is justified by the numbers, or whether the valuation already reflects much of the upside.
The case for Alphabet rests heavily on Google Cloud, which produced $17.66 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 48% from a year earlier. Operating income there more than doubled, and the business was running at an annual rate above $70 billion with a $155 billion backlog reported as of the third quarter of 2025. Those figures matter because they show a cloud unit moving from promise to scale, and they give Alphabet something few large tech names can match: growth that is still accelerating while the operation gets more profitable.
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Alphabet’s broader financial results added to that picture. The company generated $402.8 billion in full-year revenue in fiscal 2025 and posted net income of $132.17 billion, up 32% from the prior year. Google Search revenue reached $63.07 billion in the fourth quarter, while YouTube’s combined ads and subscriptions business surpassed $60 billion annually. Together, those engines help explain why the stock is trading at 26 times forward earnings, a multiple that looks demanding until measured against Alphabet’s scale and profit growth.
Sundar Pichai has also tried to frame the company’s AI push as an expansion, not a distraction. He said the Gemini App had grown to more than 750 million monthly active users and that Search was seeing more usage than ever, with AI driving what he called an expansionary moment. That message is central to the investment case now: Alphabet wants investors to see AI not as a cost center, but as another layer on top of an already dominant search and advertising machine.
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There is, however, a tension inside the story that cannot be ignored. Alphabet is planning to spend $175 billion to $185 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, a huge outlay even for a company of this size, and that spending comes as the market is still waiting to see how quickly AI and Cloud investments convert into durable earnings power. The balance sheet can absorb the bet, but the market will keep asking whether the pace of spending matches the pace of payoff.
Alphabet also keeps pushing into businesses that may matter more over time but remain harder to value today. Waymo received a $16 billion investment round in February 2026, with Alphabet funding the majority of it, underscoring how much capital the company is willing to commit beyond Search and Cloud. That adds another layer to the bull case, but also another layer of execution risk.
For now, the setup is straightforward. The stock has not yet caught up with the company’s operating momentum, the analyst crowd remains heavily favorable, and the next major checkpoint comes with Q1 2026 earnings on April 29. If Alphabet can keep Cloud growing at this pace and show that AI traffic is translating into more usage and more revenue, the current google stock price may still look like the beginning of the move rather than the end of it.
