American stock exchanges currently host seven different companies with a valuation of $1 trillion or more, but only three of them have graduated into the $3 trillion club:
- Apple: $3.5 trillion
- Nvidia: $3.4 trillion
- Microsoft: $3.2 trillion
Alphabet (GOOG 0.20%)(GOOGL 0.41%) is the world's fourth-largest company with a market capitalization of $2.1 trillion. It's the parent company of Google, YouTube, and Waymo, and the conglomerate is quickly becoming a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.
Alphabet stock is significantly cheaper than most of its big-tech peers by one traditional valuation metric, and here's why it could join the $3 trillion club in 2025.
Image source: Alphabet.
AI is transforming Alphabet's core business
At the beginning of 2023, Microsoft shocked the technology industry when it agreed to invest $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Microsoft quickly integrated OpenAI's models into its flagship products, including its Bing search engine, which was a direct attempt to erode the dominance of Google Search.
Despite some initial fear among Alphabet's shareholders, Google Search still has a global market share of 90% in the internet search industry today. Nevertheless, the conglomerate was determined to become a serious competitor in the AI race, and its latest Gemini family of AI models are among the industry's best. Seven of Alphabet's products now have 2 billion monthly users, and Gemini is integrated into all of them to transform the customer experience.
Google Search is one of those products. Alphabet introduced AI Overviews earlier this year, which are AI-generated responses that appear at the top of the regular search results. They include text, images, and links to third-party sources to give users rapid answers to their questions, which makes the traditional internet search experience more competitive with the flood of new AI chatbots hitting the market. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says Overviews are now rolling out to over 100 countries, and they will reach more than 1 billion users every month.
Google Workspace customers can also integrate Gemini into Docs, Sheets, Gmail, and more for an additional monthly subscription fee. Gemini's ability to generate and summarize text, and instantly answer questions on a range of topics can help users significantly improve their productivity. Alphabet said Workspace delivered strong growth in the third quarter of 2024 (ended Sept. 30), driven by higher revenue per user -- which can be attributed (at least partially) to customers adding Gemini to their existing plans.
NASDAQ: GOOGL
Key Data Points
Google Cloud remains Alphabet's fastest-growing business
Alphabet generated a record $88.2 billion in revenue during the third quarter, which was a 15% increase from the year-ago period. Google Search accounted for $49.3 billion of that total, and it grew by 12.2%.
But Google Cloud was the standout performer once again. It generated record revenue of $11.3 billion, which was a 34.9% year-over-year jump, making it the fastest-growing piece of Alphabet's entire organization. It also marked the fourth-consecutive quarter of accelerating growth, and 34.9% was the highest quarterly growth rate in two years.
Developing AI models is extremely expensive. The average business can't build its own data center infrastructure because graphics processing units (GPUs) from suppliers like Nvidia cost up to $40,000 each, and thousands of them are often required for AI workloads. Alphabet -- through Google Cloud -- buys hundreds of thousands of those chips and clusters them in centralized data centers, and then rents the computing capacity to developers for a fee. That makes AI accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Google Cloud operates several data centers packed with Nvidia's GPUs, in addition to chips it designed in-house like the Trillium tensor processing unit (TPU). That mix of hardware helps differentiate its data center infrastructure from its competitors. Using a combination of GPUs and TPUs, one customer -- LG AI Research -- reduced inference processing time by 50% for its multimodal AI model through Google Cloud.
Most developers pay cloud providers for computing capacity by the minute, so faster processing can bring costs down substantially. Therefore, it's no surprise that LG AI has also achieved a 72% reduction in operating costs.
Businesses can also access over 130 ready-made large language models (LLMs) on Google Cloud, which they can use to accelerate the development of AI software. That includes Gemini and a host of LLMs from leading third-party developers like Meta Platforms. Alphabet says usage of Gemini through Google Cloud has grown by a staggering 14 times over the last six months alone.
Alphabet's (mathematical) path to the $3 trillion club
Alphabet delivered $2.12 in earnings per share during Q3, representing 36.7% growth compared to the year-ago period. The company's trailing-12-month earnings per share is now $7.54, and based on its current stock price of $179.52, that places it at a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 23.8.
Alphabet is the cheapest stock in the trillion-dollar club by far. In fact, the other six trillion-dollar companies trade at an average P/E ratio of 40.9:
For Alphabet's P/E ratio to rise to 40.9, its stock would have to rise by 72% from where it currently trades. That would carry its market cap to $3.6 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world. But even if Alphabet's P/E ratio rose to 32.3 to trade in line with the Nasdaq-100 technology index, that would take the company's market cap to over $2.8 trillion.
In that scenario, Alphabet would join the $3 trillion club next year based on its forecasted earnings growth of 13.5% alone (according to Wall Street's consensus compiled by Yahoo! Finance).
But why is Alphabet's P/E ratio so low?
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet in 2020, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices by paying Apple up to $20 billion per year to make Google the default search engine on devices like the iPhone. In August this year, the judge ruled in the DOJ's favor, which leaves Alphabet in a very uncertain position.
The potential consequences are wide-ranging. Alphabet could be hit with a simple financial penalty, or it might face new rules relating to how it operates – for example, paying companies like Apple to maintain market share in the internet search industry might be off the table in the future. However, the government could also force a complete breakup of Alphabet, which would require the conglomerate to sell certain parts of its business.
Many prominent technology analysts on Wall Street think a breakup is unlikely, but any punishment that erodes the dominance of Google Search could hurt Alphabet since that remains its largest source of revenue.
With all of that said, the court won't define Alphabet's punishment until next year. If it's a financial penalty, I think investors would swoop in and buy the stock, which could result in a P/E ratio that aligns with the Nasdaq-100. That would fast-track the company's membership into the $3 trillion club. If the punishment is more severe, the matter could be tied up in the courts for years as Alphabet submits appeals to challenge the ruling.
That's why, for now, I think Alphabet stock is a no-brainer buy at its current valuation. If the company is forced to break up -- which could be several years down the road -- investors can reevaluate their position at that time.
