NEW YORK, April 17, 2026, 11:39 EDT
Alphabet hovered near $337 Friday, with investors eyeing the Google parent’s upcoming earnings on April 29. The Class A stock edged up roughly 0.4% by late morning in New York.
Timing’s in focus here. Alphabet heads into its earnings soon, grouped with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Investors are zeroed in on those steep data-center costs—will they pay off fast enough? This week, ASML and TSMC both delivered forecasts that point to the hardware push charging ahead, despite investors wanting more tangible signs of payback.
Retail chatter is picking up. On Friday, Finbold’s machine-learning model tossed out a $350.97 target for Alphabet by April 30. Thursday’s Yahoo Finance/Insider Monkey column tagged the stock as undervalued. Oakoff Investments, writing on Seeking Alpha, flagged a probable earnings beat in its preview.
Alphabet’s message to investors: brace for a jump in spending. Back in February, the company put 2026 capital expenditures at somewhere between $175 billion and $185 billion—far above this year’s $91.45 billion. Google Cloud’s fourth-quarter revenue jumped 48% to $17.7 billion. “We are seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board,” Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told analysts. Reuters
Google’s own chips are now at the center of that narrative. On April 6, Broadcom revealed a deal to work on and deliver Google’s next-gen Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—those are the in-house AI chips—plus other hardware, with the partnership stretching to 2031. That same release handed Anthropic rights to about 3.5 gigawatts worth of computing power based on Google silicon, kicking in from 2027.
But the race is getting crowded. Emarketer estimates Meta is set to pull ahead of Google in global digital ad revenue by 2026, forecasting $243.46 billion for Meta and $239.54 billion for Google. “In surpassing Google, Meta has essentially had many of its core strategies validated,” said Max Willens, principal analyst at Emarketer. Reuters
Google is pushing out the AI narrative further. According to The Information, the tech giant has been in talks over a potential deal that would allow the Pentagon to use Gemini in secure, classified environments. At the same time, NiSource announced a long-term electricity supply agreement with an Alphabet subsidiary to back a major data center project in northern Indiana.
Still, risks linger. The European Commission on Thursday laid out a plan forcing Google to hand over search data to competing engines—including AI chatbots with search capabilities—citing the Digital Markets Act, which threatens fines as high as 10% of worldwide annual sales. Over in the supply chain, TSMC flagged “very tight” capacity, underscoring that demand faces hard limits on both cost and availability. Reuters
Market conditions have improved. BlackRock bumped U.S. equities up to overweight earlier this week, pointing out that “Tech’s valuation premium has been eroded.” Earnings season has picked up, and both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq notched new highs. Reuters
The hurdle’s up. Investors are looking for real evidence that cloud gains and ad revenues can shoulder the AI expansion—without wrecking margins. This quarter won’t decide the debate, though it will push it forward.
