About a year ago, the prevalent narrative around Google was one of doubt and uncertainty. After decades of dominance in the search market, and being the gateway to the internet, Generative AI was finally considered to be rivalling Google search. Companies like ChatGPT, Anthropic and Perplexity were competing with Google Search.
This called into question about Google’s future prospect. Because Google makes most of its money through advertisements, through Google search. And a decrease in google search traffic will reduce the advertising revenue, which will in turn affect is valuation, since there will be a decrease in the future cash flow. (Remember, the value of a company is the PV of sum of all cash flows).
But then, towards the end of the year, Google launched Gemini 3, and since then, it’s been considered to be the best AI Model. ChatGPT, which was the dominant LLM since it was release on 30th November 2022, saw its market share halved by end of October 2025.
(Source: Investing visuals on X: “OpenAI reportedly plans a potential $1 TRILLION IPO in 2027)
…..
Then, it was revealed that Gemini 3 was trained exclusively on TPU’s, which are Google’s own custom processors. Moreover, Claude 4.5, which was launched just a few days after Gemini 3, also used Google’s TPUs for its training.
Overall, they are now the only company that has a stake in every layer of the AI Value Chain.
(Source: Lin on X: “Google is the only company that owns the entire AI stack)
…..
Now, Google has begun 2026 in full gear. They are now focusing more on the application layer of the AI Value Chain. And that is crucial, since this is the only way in which the whole of AI Industry stabilizes itself and gets rid of the “bubble” tag.
Apple announced that the updated Siri will be powered by Google’s Gemini.
The other thing they revealed was the Universal Commerce Protocol.
So, the public narrative around Google has changed significantly over the past 1 year. And it has been reflected in terms of stock performance, Google rose by around 65% over the past year.
Their market cap also crossed the $4 billion dollar line for the first time in their history. In the process they became only the 4th company in history to achieve this feat. Nvidia, Apple & Microsoft were the other 3 companies. However, Apple & Microsoft have dropped down.
Currently, Google’s (Alphabet’s) valuation is second only to Nvidia, but in terms of Revenue & operating income, it is actually better than Nvidia.
(Source: GenAI_Now on X: “@Google is just $0.5T away from passing @nvidia)
Let’s see what 2026 brings in for Google & the AI industry.