Google CEO Sundar Pichai gives a thumbs up as he arrives to attend the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, February 11, 2025.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
Google parent company Alphabet saw its market capitalization surpass Apple’s for the first time since 2019.
Alphabet’s market cap closed at $3.88 trillion on Wednesday. Shares of Alphabet rose more than 2% on Wednesday, closing at $322.03. Meanwhile, Apple’s market cap closed Wednesday at $3.84 trillion as shares slid more than 4% over the last five days.
The positional inversion in market cap underscores the different directions that Alphabet and Apple are heading in when it comes to their respective strategies for artificial intelligence.
Alphabet ended 2025 as one of the top performers on Wall Street after putting together the pieces for its AI comeback. In November, the company unveiled Ironwood, the seventh generation of its tensor processing units, a custom AI chip that has emerged as a potential alternative to Nvidia’s offerings. Then in December, Google introduced Gemini 3 to rave reviews.
Shares of Alphabet jumped 65% in 2025, the company’s sharpest rally since 2009, when the stock doubled coming out of the financial crisis.
CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly said the company is responding to soaring demand. On Alphabet’s October earnings call, he said that Google’s cloud business signed more deals over $1 billion in 2025 through the third quarter of the year than in the two prior years combined.
Meanwhile, Apple has remained largely absent from the tech industry’s AI race that kicked off when OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022.
Apple was supposed to launch the next generation of its Siri AI assistant last year, but the company wound up delaying that release. Apple has promised to launch the “more personal Siri” in 2026.
Wall Street firm Raymond James this week downgraded Apple, saying gains will be hard to come by in 2026.
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