NEW YORK, January 7, 2026, 15:30 EST — Regular session
- Alphabet (GOOGL.O) up about 2.5% in afternoon trade after a fresh Wall Street target raise
- Canaccord Genuity sets a $390 price target, implying roughly 21% upside from current levels
- Traders are watching Friday’s U.S. payrolls report for any shift in rate expectations
Alphabet’s Class A shares rose 2.5% to $322.25 on Wednesday, near the day’s high, after Canaccord Genuity raised its price target for the Google parent. The stock hit an intraday high of $326.11 and was up $7.91 from Tuesday’s close.
The move puts a new “Google stock price forecast” back in play just as investors rotate into the biggest AI-linked names again. Big targets matter more when a stock is already near record levels and the next leg higher needs steady earnings, not just a good story.
U.S. stocks were mixed but the S&P 500 touched a record on Wednesday, with Alphabet among the drivers as the “AI trade” returned after a bout of valuation nerves. “Buy tech and forget about it,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management, adding that “rumors that the AI trade was done turned out not to be true.” Reuters
Canaccord analyst Maria Ripps raised her Alphabet target to $390 from $330 and kept a Buy rating, arguing Google can “maintain this aggressive posture throughout 2026” as it pushes AI deeper into products. A price target is an analyst’s estimate — typically over 12 months — of where a stock could trade; Ripps pointed to cloud momentum and Google’s in-house Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, custom chips used to run AI workloads. She also flagged potential first-half volatility tied to launches of Nvidia’s Blackwell-trained models — systems built around Nvidia’s latest-generation AI chips — and signs of strain in TPU supply. StreetInsider.com
Macro data sat in the background. ADP reported private payrolls rose by 41,000 in December after a revised 29,000 decline in November, undershooting economists’ expectations, in another sign hiring has cooled even as layoffs stay low.
For Alphabet, the bulls’ path to $390 is pretty plain: keep search ads steady, keep cloud growing, and convince investors that higher AI spending is buying durable revenue rather than just bigger bills. Microsoft and Amazon are the obvious yardsticks in cloud, while Nvidia remains the market’s temperature gauge for AI demand.
There’s a catch. If jobs data or inflation surprises push bond yields higher, richly valued mega-cap tech can fall fast, even without company-specific bad news. And any hint that AI costs are climbing faster than revenue, or that regulators revisit remedies in antitrust fights, would test the latest round of optimism.
The next hard catalyst is Friday’s U.S. Employment Situation report for December, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET, which could swing rate expectations and set the tone for big-tech trading into the rest of the month. Bureau of Labor Statistics
