NEW YORK, June 26, 2026, 18:12 (EDT)
- Alphabet Class A dropped 1.84% to $337.39 Friday. Trading volume reached 361% of its 65-day average.
- S&P Dow Jones Indices is set to put Alphabet in and drop Verizon ahead of Monday’s open. Alphabet’s last close was around 7.2 times Verizon’s closing price.
- Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the company has “by far the biggest and broadest research bench” and wins “our fair share of the top talent.” Semafor
Alphabet Inc NASDAQ:GOOGL joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday, taking over from a telecom. The move gives the index more price heft, but Friday, the new Dow role didn’t hold off sellers.
Alphabet is set to join the Dow, replacing Verizon Communications Inc NYSE:VZ before the open on June 29, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices, a unit of S&P Global Inc NYSE:SPGI. The index provider said Verizon’s lower share price meant it made up just half a percentage point of the Dow.
Math is at the center for investors here. Alphabet finished at $337.39 while Verizon settled at $46.54. Because the Dow puts more weight on price than on value, Alphabet has roughly 7.2 times the price impact of Verizon from day one.
That doesn’t mean there’s a giant buy order in play. SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:DIA) ended Friday with a market value of $42.9 billion. By comparison, SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust NYSEARCA:SPY stood at $645.5 billion. Alphabet’s Class A shares came close to DIA’s size, trading about $37 billion on Friday just on closing price volume.
Alphabet will now have a bigger impact on the Dow headline than Verizon ever did. Dow-linked buying remains a small slice of Alphabet’s normal trading. For managers tracking broader benchmarks, the focus is if Alphabet’s AI spending and AI staff departures start weighing on its earnings multiple.
Alphabet Class A dropped 8.33% in the last five sessions and is down 11.29% for the month. The stock hasn’t delivered as a long-term winner, but it is still up 7.79% for the year and 88.98% over the past year.
AI staff moves kept pressure on the Dow, muting the effect of the news. Reuters said this month John Jumper, senior Google DeepMind scientist and AlphaFold co-creator, is leaving for Anthropic. Noam Shazeer, Google VP and Gemini co-lead, will head to OpenAI, Reuters also reported.
Demis Hassabis told Semafor the AI hiring market is “ferociously competitive” but said Google can still attract and keep top talent. He rejected any idea the company is losing ground. Semafor
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Reuters “there is so much demand for limited AI research talent” and said OpenAI and Anthropic are able to offer less bureaucracy than big tech firms. Reuters
The spending layer puts extra weight on those departures for shareholders. Reuters said on June 3 that Alphabet boosted its equity offering to $84.75 billion for AI and hiked its annual capital spending forecast by $5 billion to $180 billion-$190 billion in April.
Dow’s first clean test is set for Monday. On Friday, Alphabet traded between $330.20 and $346.36, ending the session closer to the lower end.
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