Alphabet Tops Nvidia Briefly After $200B Anthropic Cloud Deal

Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia in after-hours trading after Anthropic agreed to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud for 5 gigawatts of computing power. The development pushed Alphabet’s market value momentarily above Nvidia’s; by the close of trading Friday Alphabet’s market capitalization was about $4.8 trillion and Nvidia’s about $5.2 trillion.

Anthropic’s commitment covers five gigawatts of compute capacity on Google Cloud and totals $200 billion. The agreement focused investor attention on Google Cloud’s data-center operations and on Google’s custom tensor processing units, or TPUs. Analysts at Mizuho estimate TPU sales could add about $61 billion to Google Cloud’s pipeline by 2027, with most of that business expected to be recorded within the next year.

Alphabet’s shares have risen roughly 160% over the past year, driven by investor expectations tied to Google Search, the Gemini chatbot, cloud services and the company’s own chips. On Oct. 31 Nvidia’s market value was about $4.9 trillion while Alphabet’s was below $3.4 trillion, narrowing a previously larger gap.

Hardware and infrastructure stocks have also gained: Advanced Micro Devices, Intel and Micron have each risen more than 100% year-to-date, and Broadcom is up roughly 107% among U.S.-listed tech companies with market values above $1 trillion.

Concerns that AI-generated answers would reduce search advertising revenue have eased as Google integrated AI into Search and as Gemini saw wide use. Alphabet trades at about 28 times estimated earnings, above its long-term average of under 21 times. In the past month analysts raised forecasts for Alphabet’s net income for 2026 by roughly 19% and for 2027 by more than 7%. The median 12-month analyst price target is near $422, about 5% above Friday’s close.

Google’s capital expenditures could reach about $190 billion this year, roughly double 2025 levels, which increases the need for AI spending to translate into revenue. Investors will look to Google’s I/O developer conference in under two weeks for updates on Gemini, AI agents and plans to monetize expanded AI usage.

Nvidia faces pressure to sustain demand for its data-center chips. Analysts expect about 78% year-over-year revenue growth in the upcoming earnings report. Nvidia’s stock is up about 15% so far this year and it remained the largest company by market capitalization at the end of the trading day.

The brief change in market rankings reflected investor reaction to a large cloud contract and increased attention to alternatives to Nvidia’s hardware as cloud providers develop their own processors and compute offerings.