Alphabet Closes In on Nvidia as World's Most Valuable Company
Nvidia built the AI engine. Alphabet is building the car, the road, and the toll booth. The market is pricing accordingly.
May 2, 2026 - 4:47 pm
TL;DR
Alphabet’s market capitalisation surged past $4.6 trillion after a 10% stock jump on Q1 2026 earnings that beat estimates across every division, with Google Cloud growing 63% to cross $20 billion. The gap with Nvidia, which fell 6% following reports of missed growth targets by OpenAI, has narrowed to roughly $200 billion, and options traders assign a 53% probability that Alphabet will overtake Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company before mid-May.
On Thursday, Alphabet's share price rose nearly 10% after reporting first-quarter revenue of $109.9 billion, a 22% increase year over year that exceeded analyst estimates by almost $3 billion. Google Cloud crossed $20 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, growing 63%. The cloud backlog nearly doubled quarter on quarter to more than $460 billion. Earnings per share surged 81%. Search queries hit an all-time high. The stock closed at $381.94, pushing Alphabet’s market capitalisation above $4.6 trillion. Nvidia, which closed the same day at $198.61 with a market capitalisation of approximately $4.8 trillion, had fallen more than 6% over the previous two sessions.
The gap between the two companies is now roughly $200 billion. Options traders are assigning approximately a 53% probability that Alphabet will touch $5 trillion before May 15. If it does, and Nvidia does not rally into or beyond its earnings report on May 20, Alphabet will become the most valuable company in the world. The last time it held that title was February 2016, when it briefly overtook Apple for two days.
The Earnings
The numbers that moved the market were not just large but structurally different from what Alphabet reported a year ago. Google Cloud’s 63% growth rate accelerated from 48 per cent in the prior quarter, making it the fastest-growing division among the three major cloud platforms. AWS grew 17%. Microsoft Azure grew 33%.
Sundar Pichai told analysts on the earnings call that the company was compute-constrained in the near term and that cloud revenue would have been higher if capacity had kept pace with demand. Revenue from products built on generative AI models grew nearly 800% year over year. YouTube advertising reached $9.9 billion, up 11%, and Alphabet now has 350 million paid subscriptions across YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, and Google One.