Have you ever watched a stock you love just keep climbing and wondered if it’s finally time to take some profits—or if the best chapters are still ahead? That’s exactly where I find myself with Alphabet these days.
The shares are already up roughly 74% year-to-date in 2025, which is frankly ridiculous for a company this size. Most giants struggle to grow revenue teens, never mind deliver that kind of price appreciation. Yet here we are, and one major Wall Street firm just argued the party isn’t close to being over.
A Bold New Price Target That Turned Heads
Guggenheim recently lifted their 12-month target on Alphabet from $330 all the way to $375 per share—implying another 17% upside from where the stock closed last Friday. They kept their buy rating intact and basically said: the biggest, most scaled tech names are about to separate themselves from the pack again in 2026.
In my experience, when an analyst this confident raises numbers that aggressively, it’s worth digging into the reasoning. Sometimes it’s hype. Sometimes it’s actually seeing something the consensus is missing. In this case, I think it’s the latter.
Catalyst #1: Google Cloud Is Quietly Becoming a Monster
Let’s start with the part that genuinely surprised me. The analyst highlighted exceptional cloud backlog growth fueled by enterprise AI demand. Translation: companies aren’t just testing AI anymore—they’re signing massive, multi-year contracts to run it at scale, and Google Cloud is winning a shocking amount of that business.
The numbers are almost hard to believe. One research note suggested consensus estimates could be underestimating Google Cloud’s run-rate revenue potential by roughly $40 billion once all the current backlog starts hitting the income statement. Forty billion. That’s more than the entire market cap of many respectable tech companies.
“We see a plausible bull case at Cloud that would indicate consensus under-appreciates run-rate revenue potential by ~$40bn based on backlog growth.”
– Guggenheim analyst note, December 2025
Think about that for a second. If even half of that gap closes over the next couple of years, we’re talking about a fundamental re-rating of the entire company. The market has rewarded AWS and Azure handsomely for their cloud leadership. Google Cloud growing faster than both right now feels like the market’s best-kept secret.
Catalyst #2: YouTube Refuses to Slow Down
I still meet investors who think of YouTube as “just the video site.” That mental model is hopelessly outdated. YouTube is now the largest streaming platform on earth by hours watched—bigger than Netflix, Disney+, and everyone else combined in many countries.
More importantly, the monetization engine is hitting a new gear. Shorts, in particular, have gone from an also-ran TikTok competitor to a legitimate cash machine. The analyst pointed out that Shorts now generate higher revenue per hour than traditional long-form videos. That’s wild when you remember how quickly the format exploded.
- Structural shift of viewing hours toward YouTube (especially Shorts)
- Advertising dollars following eyeballs faster than expected
- Subscription products (Premium, Music, TV) adding high-margin recurring revenue
Put simply, YouTube isn’t just maintaining dominance—it’s expanding the moat. Every quarter that streaming fragmentation continues, YouTube looks more like the default living-room screen for an entire generation.
Catalyst #3: Gemini Is Turning Into the AI Platform Everyone Actually Uses
I’ll be honest—when Gemini first launched, I was skeptical. Another me-too large language model in a sea of them. But the adoption curves they’re posting now are legitimately eye-popping.
Monthly active users have nearly doubled from 350 million in March to 650 million today. Over 85,000 enterprises are already building on Gemini. Video generation with Veo 3 alone has topped 230 million clips. These aren’t vanity metrics—these are the kinds of numbers that turn into real revenue through Cloud, Workspace integration, and eventually enhanced search products.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect? Gemini appears to be the rare AI product that both consumers love and enterprises trust at scale. That’s an incredibly difficult combination to pull off. If Google can keep executing here, the revenue tailwinds in 2026–2027 could be staggering.
Putting It All Together: Why the Multiple Can Keep Expanding
Alphabet has historically traded at a discount to some of its mega-cap peers because investors worried about the eventual slowdown of search growth. Fair concern—until you realize the company has spent the last decade building entirely new growth engines that are only now reaching escape velocity.
When you have:
- Core search still growing mid-teens
- YouTube accelerating
- Cloud potentially adding tens of billions in high-margin revenue
- Gemini becoming the default enterprise AI stack
…well, the old “mature tech company” narrative starts to crack. The market is slowly waking up to the fact that Alphabet may actually be earlier in its growth story than people think.
Is $375 aggressive? Sure. But sometimes the aggressive targets are the ones that end up looking conservative eighteen months later. I’ve learned not to bet against companies that keep printing pleasant surprises quarter after quarter.
Full disclosure: I own Alphabet shares in my personal portfolio and have no plans to sell anytime soon. The combination of defensive cash flows and multiple offensive growth drivers feels almost unfair at this valuation.
If you’re sitting on the sidelines wondering whether the run is over, the latest research suggests the answer might be a pretty decisive no. Sometimes the best investments are the ones that keep proving the skeptics wrong—one dominant quarter at a time.
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