NEW YORK, March 30, 2026, 11:14 (EDT)
Wells Fargo bumped its price target on Alphabet up to $397 from $387, sticking with its Overweight call. Shares, though, lingered around five-month lows: Alphabet last traded at $274.38 late Monday morning, barely moving after Friday’s close marked the stock’s lowest point since October 2025, Barron’s reported.
Alphabet’s call takes on urgency as it pushes investors to swallow a hefty new spending round. Back in February, the company projected 2026 capital expenditures between $175 billion and $185 billion—a jump that’s left Wall Street pressing for answers on the pace of AI payoffs.
Google Cloud stands out with the sharpest results so far. The business posted 48% revenue growth in the fourth quarter, hitting $17.7 billion. Contracted backlog surged 55% from the previous quarter, reaching $240 billion. Reuters captured CEO Sundar Pichai’s comment: “We are seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board.” Alphabet Investor Relations
Wells analyst Ken Gawrelski, in a note flagged Friday, pointed to Google’s “compute capacity advantage” as a driver for tapping fresh profit streams. According to Seeking Alpha, the bank forecasts that TPU licensing combined with the Wiz deal should boost Google Cloud revenue by 4% in 2026, jumping to 7% in 2027. Barron’s
Tensor processing units, or TPUs, are Google’s own AI chips. Back in October, Reuters said Anthropic is set to receive over one gigawatt of TPU capacity starting in 2026, aimed at powering new Claude models. The move highlights Google’s drive to ramp up sales of its proprietary tech via Google Cloud.
With the Wiz deal, Wells Fargo gets another option. Google wrapped up its $32 billion acquisition on March 11, folding the cloud security firm into Google Cloud as it chases Amazon and Microsoft. After the announcement, Google confirmed Wiz would remain compatible with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian described the move as building a “unified security platform” catering to customers running workloads on multiple clouds. Alphabet Investor Relations
Momentum shifted after a Los Angeles jury held Google and Meta responsible in a youth social-media addiction trial last week, handing down $6 million in damages. Barron’s noted Alphabet shares slid 2.3% Friday, ending at $274.34—the lowest since October 2025. Both firms intend to appeal, according to Reuters.
Risks aren’t off the table. Alphabet is pushing to fold Wiz into its operations just as it ramps up spending on servers, data centers and network hardware—a move flagged back in February, when the company warned that capacity would stay tight all year. Now, last week’s verdict throws another legal cloud into the mix.
Monday’s price puts Wells Fargo’s fresh target about 45% higher—plenty of room, on paper. But Google Cloud remains the sticking point; investors want to see Alphabet actually convert all that heavy AI spending into top-line expansion they’ll pay up for.
