I'm not a betting man. But if I were, I think I'd skip Polymarket and buy a plane ticket to Las Vegas. At least there, I could have a drink and watch a show while losing money.
Instead of betting, I prefer to invest, where I have a better chance of making money. If you've got money to put to work that you don't need for other things, I'd say skip a Polymarket wager and take a look at Google's parent company, Alphabet (GOOG 1.49%) (GOOGL 1.42%).
It was start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic that dominated the artificial intelligence (AI) sector for the first couple of years after ChatGPT brought large language models (LLM) AI into the mainstream. But it was only a matter of time until one of the big fish in the tech pond threw its weight behind its own AI program. And Alphabet might be the biggest fish.
Image source: Getty Images.
The tech juggernaut
Google doesn't need much of an introduction. You've probably used it several times today. Google has basically become synonymous with search engines in the same way Xerox did with photocopiers. When's the last time anyone asked Jeeves anything?
Beyond Google, Alphabet owns YouTube, and Gmail is the most widely used email platform, with 1.8 billion users or about one-fourth of the world's population. Alphabet's Google Cloud is racking up revenue. Meanwhile, Google Gemini -- the company's premier AI product -- is emerging as a leader in the enterprise LLM market.
Alphabet's breadth of products gives it ample revenue to outspend the competition and come out on top of the AI arms race. Look no further than what the company is doing with its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).
The TPU, which Alphabet co-developed with Broadcom (AVGO 1.48%), has emerged as one of only a handful of rivals to Nvidia's (NVDA 1.49%) graphics processing unit (GPU).
There are pros and cons to both TPU and GPU, and I won't get into the technical weeds here. But it does say a lot about TPU's capabilities that the current enterprise LLM market leader, Anthropic, which closed 2025 with 40% market share, has announced plans to use Alphabet's TPU and Google Cloud technology.
Anthropic plans to deploy 1 million TPU chips in 2026, which is set to cost it tens of billions of dollars and bring over 1 gigawatt of computing capacity online by the year's end.
So, even if Google's software doesn't dominate the enterprise LLM market, the market leader is going to be using plenty of Alphabet's hardware, so it wins either way.
NASDAQ: GOOG
Key Data Points
Gaining popularity
Furthermore, the data centers that AI requires to run aren't cheap to build. That has seen Alphabet and others like Amazon (AMZN 1.58%), Meta Platforms (META 2.48%), and Microsoft (MSFT 0.41%) announce they will be spending hundreds of billions of dollars this year to expand their data center capacity.
Of those four companies, only Alphabet and Meta have mass-market generative AI products, and only Alphabet's are competitive, as Meta controlled 16% market share in 2023 but has since halved its share to 8%.
So, while Amazon and Microsoft have the same kind of money to throw around that Alphabet does, neither has a direct competitor to Gemini or their own answer to the TPU chip.
Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has achieved profitability, and both are a few years away from it at least. So there is no way they can out-spend Alphabet. That all paints a picture of a clear path for Alphabet to AI market dominance.
And its latest results show that Alphabet's AI strategies are already paying off handsomely.
One of the biggest and richest fish in the pond
For the whole of 2025, Alphabet saw its revenue climb 15%, exceeding $402 billion. Net income for the year topped $132 billion, a 32% increase over 2024. The company's diluted earnings per share (EPS) shot up 34% as well.
Alphabet also grew its cash and cash equivalents 32% to $126.8 billion, as of the end of 2025, with long-term debt of $46.5 billion and total debt of $59.29 billion. So it could easily pay off all its debt with one check, which is an ideal balance sheet as far as I'm concerned.
In all, Alphabet managed a gross margin of 59.65% for 2025 along with an operating margin of 32% and a net margin of 32.8%. So even with rising costs associated with data centers, it has a massive cushion of profit before those costs start to become burdensome.
There are no sure things in investing, but Alphabet might be one of the closest things to it. Give the company a look if you want to make a safe bet that's likely to pay off.
