Top Tech Winner Amid Shifting Market Trends Calls Out Alphabet

Alphabet has surged to the top of this year’s “Magnificent Seven,” driven by the company’s diverse and strengthening growth engines. After spending much of the year in negative territory until late July, Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG) has mounted a strong rebound, with its upward trend largely unaffected by November’s tech-sector downturn. Confidence in the company was underscored by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which recently purchased $4.34 billion in Google shares. Year to date, Alphabet has delivered a 59% gain, making it the strongest performer among the group.

Google Search & Other—responsible for roughly 55% of Alphabet’s September-quarter revenue—expanded about 15% year over year, defying predictions that AI would significantly erode its dominance. Despite the proliferation of new AI models, Google has actually expanded its footprint in generative AI. Data from Similarweb shows Gemini’s share of GenAI web traffic rising to 13.7% from 5.6% a year earlier, narrowing the gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Google Cloud remains one of the top three cloud providers globally. Synergy Research Group reports that in the third quarter Amazon Web Services held 29% of global cloud share, Microsoft Azure 20%, and Google Cloud 13%. Google Cloud grew revenue 34% year over year—outpacing Azure’s 33% and AWS’s 20%.

Alphabet is also advancing in quantum computing, unveiling the Willow chip and its Quantum Echoes algorithm. Its autonomous driving arm, Waymo, is widely viewed as a potentially massive long-term opportunity. On the third-quarter earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted strong progress, noting that 2026 is positioned to be a pivotal year for the business.

In AI hardware, the company has built its own Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), developed through its TensorFlow platform, first deployed internally in 2015 and made available externally starting in 2018.

After its sharp climb since late July, the stock shows signs of fatigue, with the 14-day RSI now in overbought territory. A potential pullback could send shares toward the $290 level, the upper limit of a recent consolidation zone, while closing the gap from late October could pull the stock toward $275. Alphabet ended Friday at a record close of $299.66 but failed to surpass its intraday peak of $306.42. According to Koyfin, analysts’ average price target stands at $321.94, reflecting roughly 7% upside potential.