Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) Stock on December 9, 2025: EU AI Probe, Gemini 3 Momentum and Bold 2026 Price Targets

Google parent Alphabet is closing out 2025 as one of the defining stocks of the AI boom – and, on December 9, it’s doing so under the twin spotlights of record profits and fresh regulatory scrutiny.

Alphabet stock today: price, performance and market cap

As of midday trading on December 9, 2025, Alphabet’s Class C shares (GOOG) are changing hands around $314–315, with Class A shares (GOOGL) at roughly $313–314.

Multiple data providers now place Alphabet’s market capitalization at about $3.8 trillion, making it the third‑most valuable company in the world, behind only Nvidia and Apple. ^[1]

Performance in 2025 has been exceptional. Nasdaq’s recap of the “Magnificent Seven” notes that Alphabet is up about 67% year to date, more than doubling off its 52‑week low and handily beating the gains of its mega‑cap peers. ^[2] A detailed performance review from PredictStreet/FinancialContent pegs 1‑year total returns at roughly 84% for GOOGL and 81% for GOOG, dramatically outpacing both the S&P 500 and the communication‑services sector. ^[3]

On valuation, trailing price‑to‑earnings ratios in the 30–32x range and EV/revenue around 10x suggest Alphabet no longer trades at a discount to the market – it’s now priced as a premium AI platform rather than a mature ad business. ^[4] Yet several large‑cap tech peers are in similar territory, which is a big part of why many analysts still see room for upside rather than bubble territory.

Q3 2025: Alphabet’s first $100 billion quarter

The fundamental backdrop to the stock’s re‑rating is Alphabet’s blockbuster third quarter of 2025, its first‑ever quarter above $100 billion in revenue.

According to Alphabet’s SEC filings and multiple analyst summaries, Q3 2025 revenue reached about $102.3 billion, up 16% year over year. Net income climbed roughly 33% to around $35 billion, with diluted EPS of $2.87, beating consensus estimates by a wide margin. ^[5]

Segment detail shows broad‑based strength:

Google Services (Search, YouTube, Android, hardware and subscriptions) delivered about $87.1 billion in revenue, up 14%.
Google Search & other ads grew ~15% to $56.6 billion.
YouTube ads also rose 15% to about $10.3 billion.
Subscriptions, Platforms & Devices – including YouTube Premium, YouTube TV, Google One and Pixel hardware – climbed 21% to $12.9 billion.
Google Cloud surged 34% year over year to $15.2 billion, with AI workloads a key driver. ^[6]

Operating income came in around $31.2 billion for the quarter, representing a 30.5% operating margin. Excluding a roughly €3.5 billion EU antitrust fine recorded in Q3, adjusted operating margin would have been closer to 33.9%, underlining how profitable Alphabet’s core businesses now are even in the face of regulatory costs. ^[7]

Cash‑flow metrics are equally notable. Alphabet generated about $48.4 billion in operating cash flow in Q3 alone and $24.5 billion in free cash flow, with trailing 12‑month FCF around $73.6 billion. ^[8] That gave management room both to absorb aggressive AI and data‑center capex – Q3 capex was roughly $24 billion, part of a projected $91–93 billion for full‑year 2025 – and to keep returning capital via buybacks and a small dividend. ^[9]

Alphabet’s Board has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.21 per share, payable December 15, 2025, to shareholders of record as of December 8. At current prices, that’s a yield of roughly 0.25–0.30% – symbolically small, but important as Alphabet continues to evolve from pure growth stock to cash‑returning AI utility. ^[10]

Gemini 3: from “AI laggard” to perceived leader

Much of the 2025 story is encapsulated in a single name: Gemini 3.

Google formally introduced Gemini 3 in mid‑November as its “most intelligent AI model,” stressing major improvements in reasoning, multimodal understanding and coding compared with previous generations. The model is already available through the Gemini app, AI Studio and Vertex AI, with a forthcoming “Deep Think” mode aimed at more complex long‑horizon tasks. ^[11]

Analysts widely credit Gemini 3’s launch – and strong benchmark showings against rival models – for the stock’s sharp rally into late November. Coverage from outlets like The Economic Times and Barchart reports that Gemini 3 outperformed OpenAI and Anthropic models in several tests, helping propel Alphabet shares above $300 for the first time and driving a single‑day gain of nearly 6% around November 24. ^[12]

A series of recent pieces from market commentators – including Seeking Alpha’s “Gemini 3 changes everything,” Fortune’s analysis of OpenAI‑linked stocks, and broader AI coverage – frame Alphabet as having flipped the narrative from “AI loser” to full‑stack AI leader. ^[13] PredictStreet’s deep‑dive notes that Gemini 3 and the company’s custom TPUs have become the central drivers of both revenue growth and margin expansion in 2025. ^[14]

Google itself has disclosed that the broader Gemini ecosystem now reaches more than 650 million monthly active users, with external estimates suggesting around 75 million daily active AI users across Search, YouTube and Workspace when Gemini 3 is included. ^[15] The result is that Gemini is not just a science project or a showcase demo – it has become a mainstream product surface embedded across Google’s consumer and enterprise footprint.

TPUs and vertical integration: Alphabet’s AI moat

What truly distinguishes Alphabet in the current AI arms race, according to multiple research notes, is its vertically integrated stack:

It controls the models (Gemini 3 and successors).
It designs custom Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips with partners like Broadcom.
It owns the distribution via Search, Android, YouTube and Google Cloud. ^[16]

TradingNews’ November forecast piece argues that Alphabet’s seventh‑generation TPU, developed with Broadcom, achieves up to 4x higher performance per dollar versus comparable inference chips, allowing Google to run Gemini fully on TPUs rather than relying solely on Nvidia GPUs. ^[17] That’s important because inference – running models at scale after training – represents the majority of AI compute demand and therefore the biggest long‑term cost bucket.

The same report highlights potential multi‑billion‑dollar TPU deals with Meta and Apple, along with existing partnerships with Anthropic, suggesting Alphabet could convert its internal chip advantage into a new external revenue line by selling TPU capacity through Google Cloud. ^[18] Analysts at other outlets and data providers echo the thesis that TPUs may gradually compress Nvidia’s AI margin dominance, even if Nvidia maintains the lead in the highest‑end training workloads. ^[19]

A detailed financial overview from PredictStreet notes that Google Cloud’s revenue grew 34% year over year in Q3 2025 and that its operating margin jumped from 17.1% to 23.7%, driven in part by AI infrastructure and generative‑AI services. ^[20] For investors, that combination – rapid growth plus improving profitability – is exactly what a durable AI moat is supposed to look like.

Space data centres and AI energy demand

Alphabet’s ambitions are not limited to Earth. In a widely discussed interview and subsequent coverage, CEO Sundar Pichai outlined “Project Suncatcher,” a plan to test space‑based data centres by 2027 to alleviate terrestrial power bottlenecks caused by AI compute demand. ^[21]

Reporting from Benzinga describes a roadmap in which Google launches “tiny racks of machines” on satellites to experiment with thermal management and reliability in orbit, with the long‑term vision of orbital computing powered directly by solar energy outside Earth’s atmosphere. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk publicly reacted to the concept with a single word on X – “Interesting” – underlining that even rival tech billionaires are watching Google’s energy strategy closely. ^[22]

The project remains speculative and years away from commercial impact, but it illustrates how far Alphabet is willing to go to secure the energy and compute needed for its AI roadmap – and it gives the market yet another long‑duration narrative to price in.

Fresh partnerships: Gemini agents on Google Cloud

The AI story is also playing out through partners. On December 9, EPAM Systems announced it had launched seven production‑ready AI agents on Google Cloud Marketplace, built with support for Gemini Enterprise and Google’s Agent‑to‑Agent protocol. ^[23]

These agents target industry‑specific use cases spanning finance, healthcare, retail and data analytics – from KYC automation and clinical document authoring to SQL optimization and video processing. ^[24] While this is small in isolation, it’s indicative of the broader trend: third‑party developers are increasingly standardizing on Gemini and Google Cloud as a platform for building agentic AI solutions, which should reinforce both cloud adoption and stickiness over time.

EU antitrust probe: a new overhang on the AI story

The biggest new headline on December 9, 2025 is not a product launch, but a regulatory shock. The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s use of online content – including publishers’ websites and YouTube videos – to train its AI models, notably Gemini. ^[25]

According to the Commission’s statement and reporting from outlets such as The Guardian, MarketWatch and CoinCentral, regulators will examine whether Google: ^[26]

Imposes unfair terms on publishers and creators by effectively requiring them to allow AI training as a condition of being indexed or hosted.
Grants itself privileged access to content while preventing rival AI developers from using the same material, particularly YouTube videos.
Uses publisher content in AI Overviews and other AI‑generated search features without appropriate compensation or a meaningful ability to opt out.

CoinCentral notes that, under EU rules, Alphabet could theoretically face a fine of up to 10% of global annual revenue if found to have breached competition law – a figure that would run into tens of billions of dollars given the company’s current scale. ^[27]

This probe adds to a long list of European actions against Alphabet, including a roughly €3 billion ad‑tech fine earlier in 2025 and multiple prior antitrust cases. ^[28] While MarketWatch reports that the new investigation has only caused a modest dip in the share price so far, investors will be weighing the risk of further fines and behavioural remedies that could affect both the economics of AI Overviews and Google’s leverage over publishers. ^[29]

AI rivalry: OpenAI, GPT‑5.2 and the benchmark battle

Regulators aren’t Alphabet’s only concern. The model‑quality arms race with OpenAI remains intense.

Investor’s Business Daily reports that OpenAI is expected to roll out GPT‑5.2 this week, in part as a response to Gemini 3’s strong benchmark performance. The piece highlights that Google stock has surged about 65% in 2025, even as ChatGPT still leads on raw usage, with over 800 million weekly users versus roughly 650 million monthly Gemini users. ^[30]

Financial press coverage from the Financial Times, Barchart and others notes that Google’s custom TPU chips have already helped Gemini 3 surpass OpenAI’s flagship models in several independent benchmarks, creating a narrative that Alphabet has seized technical leadership in at least part of the AI stack. ^[31]

The competitive dynamic is important for the stock because much of Alphabet’s recent re‑rating reflects investor conviction that it will not be structurally displaced by OpenAI or Microsoft in AI – and may, in fact, be the long‑term winner once infrastructure, chips and distribution are considered together.

Institutional flows, insider sales and balance sheet strength

On the ownership side, new 13F filings show that large asset managers continue to add to Alphabet.

MarketBeat reports that State Street Corp lifted its position in GOOG by 1.3% in Q2, to nearly 189 million shares worth roughly $33.5 billion, making Alphabet its 11th‑largest holding. ^[32] Another filing shows Investment Management Corp of Ontario boosting its stake by 22% to about 425,655 shares, now its 14th‑largest holding. ^[33]

At the same time, insiders – including CEO Sundar Pichai and top legal executive Kent Walker – have sold shares over the last quarter, with MarketBeat tallying about 228,900 shares sold for roughly $62 million in proceeds over 90 days. ^[34] Insider selling in mega‑caps is common (stock‑based compensation has to be monetized somehow), but investors will still keep an eye on the cadence relative to buybacks and institutional inflows.

From a balance‑sheet perspective, Alphabet finished Q3 with about $98.5 billion in cash and marketable securities and around $21.6 billion in long‑term debt, leaving it in a clear net‑cash position despite enormous AI capex. ^[35] That balance sheet is one reason credit markets view Alphabet very differently from heavily leveraged AI aspirants elsewhere in Big Tech.

What Wall Street expects: consensus and 2026–27 targets

Across Wall Street, the tone on Alphabet has shifted from cautious to broadly bullish – though there is disagreement on how much upside remains after the big 2025 run.

A consensus snapshot compiled by PredictStreet suggests that most analysts rate GOOGL/GOOG as “Buy” or “Outperform”, with average 12‑month price targets loosely clustered between $310 and $330, and high‑end targets ranging from $390 to $420. ^[36]

Additional datapoints:

Barron’s recently highlighted that about 84% of covering analysts now rate Alphabet a “Buy”, up from 80% a year ago, with the average price target rising to roughly $332 and at least one major broker lifting its target to $400. ^[37]
TickerNerd puts Alphabet’s market cap around $3.8T with a trailing P/E near 31x, and notes that analyst targets imply mid‑single‑digit upside from current prices, with a median target in the low‑to‑mid‑$330s and a “Strong Buy” consensus. ^[38]
TradingNews goes further, arguing that GOOGL “eyes $345–$400 by 2026” as Gemini and TPUs scale, and maintaining a “Strong Buy” verdict based on projected 14–16% revenue growth and continued margin strength. ^[39]

Taken together, the picture is of a stock where consensus sees modest upside over 12 months, but where a growing camp of AI‑focused analysts is willing to underwrite more aggressive scenarios if Alphabet’s TPU and Gemini bets translate into material new revenue streams by 2026–27.

Key risks: regulation, capex and competitive pressure

Despite the euphoria, there are real risks that investors in Alphabet – or any AI‑heavy name – need to consider.

Regulatory overhang
The new EU investigation targeting Google’s AI content practices lands on top of prior fines and ongoing probes in both Europe and the US. Potential outcomes include multi‑billion‑euro penalties, stricter consent and compensation regimes for content, and constraints on how Gemini can be deployed in Search and YouTube. ^[40]
Capex intensity and AI “arms race” risk
Alphabet expects $91–93 billion in capital expenditure for 2025, largely for AI chips, data centres and networking. ^[41] If AI economics don’t ultimately justify that level of investment – or if customers cut back – return on capital could fall. Separate coverage of Oracle’s debt‑heavy AI push has prompted questions about whether the broader AI infrastructure boom could be overbuilt. ^[42]
Competition from OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and others
Gemini 3’s strong benchmarks don’t guarantee permanent leadership. OpenAI’s expected GPT‑5.2 and ongoing innovation from Meta, Anthropic and others could erode Alphabet’s AI edge or compress pricing for cloud‑based AI services. ^[43]
Environmental and political scrutiny
Google’s own sustainability reports and external coverage point to sharply higher emissions from AI‑driven data centre expansion – for example, a planned UK data centre expected to emit hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO₂ annually. ^[44] That makes Alphabet a target not just for competition regulators but for climate activists and policymakers.

What to watch next for Alphabet stock

For investors tracking Alphabet through the end of 2025 and into 2026, several catalysts stand out:

Q4 2025 earnings and 2026 guidance, particularly around capex, Google Cloud growth and Gemini monetization.
Updates on the EU antitrust investigation, including any preliminary findings or settlement talks.
Concrete TPU deals with hyperscalers like Meta or large enterprise customers, which would validate the “AI infrastructure provider” thesis. ^[45]
Further Gemini 3 adoption metrics, especially in Workspace and enterprise use cases, where high‑margin recurring revenue could meaningfully move the needle. ^[46]

Alphabet has moved from being priced as a cheap, misunderstood ad business to being valued more like an AI infrastructure giant. Whether today’s nearly $3.8 trillion valuation proves conservative or optimistic will hinge on how the company manages three interlocking forces: AI execution, regulatory negotiation and capital discipline.