LAS VEGAS, April 22, 2026, 12:10 PDT
Wall Street handed Alphabet another vote of confidence Wednesday. BMO Capital Markets bumped its price target to $410, while BofA Securities stuck with its Buy call at $370 as the Google parent’s April 29 earnings approach. Shares traded 1.7% higher around $337.93 by midday.
Investors want proof that Alphabet’s costly AI push will actually give a lift to search ads and cloud revenue, rather than just soaking up more cash. At its Cloud Next event in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Google made AI agents — these are pieces of software that handle tasks with minimal human involvement — the main feature of its pitch to business clients, and also introduced new in-house chips designed for model training and inference, which is how AI systems spit out answers after they’ve learned from data.
BMO’s Brian Pitz bumped his price target on Alphabet to $410 from $400 and stayed with an Outperform. “Best way to own AI,” he called it. The bank pointed to a pick-up in Google.com traffic, reading it as evidence Alphabet’s rollout of AI Overviews—those AI-generated highlights above some searches—is gaining traction. BMO lifted its 2026 Google Cloud forecast by 5%, now modeling year-over-year growth at 44%. TipRanks
Gemini upgrades will likely continue to drive gains in search use and ad results, BofA’s Justin Post said. Post is looking for Alphabet to deliver $92 billion in Q1 revenue and $2.69 a share in earnings—both just above expectations. He’s modeling Search and Other revenue up 18%, Google Cloud growth picking up to 49%, and cloud margins climbing to 29%.
KeyBanc’s Justin Patterson bumped his price target on Alphabet up to $380 from $370, saying in a note picked up by Barron’s this week that the market still doesn’t fully grasp how much Google Cloud could accelerate. Patterson pointed out Alphabet’s various ways to cash in on AI and projected earnings per share nearing $14 by 2027, with the cloud unit gaining traction and Search maintaining low double-digit growth.
Google didn’t just stick to talking points at Cloud Next. The company rolled Vertex AI into its wider Gemini Enterprise platform, now touting access to over 200 models—Anthropic’s Claude among them. CEO Thomas Kurian described a “strategic shift” to Reuters, with customers pivoting from legacy machine-learning to more tailored AI agents. On top of that, Google announced the TPU 8t chip for training big models and the TPU 8i for inference. Google Cloud
New deals continue stacking up. Merck plans to pour up to $1 billion into Google for AI infrastructure, engineers, and Gemini Enterprise licenses over several years. “This isn’t a pilot,” Merck’s Dave Williams said. PepsiCo’s also on board with a multi-year Gemini Enterprise partnership. Meanwhile, Salesforce is expanding its Google Cloud collaboration, aiming to let AI agents work across both firms’ platforms. Reuters
The setup isn’t a straight shot. Back in February, Alphabet flagged that capital spending in 2026 might hit between $175 billion and $185 billion. BMO’s take? Cloud demand isn’t the problem—supply is, and that’s slowing down how quickly growth can accelerate. Google Cloud has closed some of the gap, but it’s still sitting behind Amazon and Microsoft. That margin doesn’t leave Alphabet much space for error if AI revenues are slow to materialize.
Alphabet’s first-quarter numbers land after the bell April 29, with the conference call on tap for 4:30 p.m. Eastern. The big question circling investors: How firmly are Gemini, Search, and Google Cloud supporting each other—and is it enough to justify all those recent target price bumps?
