According to data, Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) saw its stock price rise by 33.8% in April. This marks Alphabet’s best monthly performance since October 2004 — two months after the company’s initial public offering (IPO) — when it posted a 47.1% gain.
In comparison, the S&P 500 returned 10.5% in April, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index returned 15.3%. The entire artificial intelligence-related stock sector performed particularly strongly during the month. For example, chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) surged 74% in April. Therefore, while Alphabet’s stock price received a significant boost from the overall strong market, the company also had its own catalysts.
Alphabet’s stock climbed steadily throughout April, with its largest single-day gain occurring at the end of the month — after the company released excellent first-quarter 2026 results on April 29, the stock jumped 10% on April 30. Subsequently, multiple Wall Street firms significantly raised their one-year price targets.
In the first quarter, Alphabet’s revenue increased 22% year-over-year to $109.9 billion. Within this, Google Services revenue grew 16% to $89.6 billion, while Google Cloud revenue, driven by strong demand for AI products and infrastructure, surged 63% to $20 billion. The company’s broad-based, robust performance highlights its success in monetizing AI spending.
Earnings per share (EPS) grew 82% year-over-year to $5.11, far exceeding Wall Street expectations of $2.63. However, a large portion of the net income ($36.9 billion) came from unrealized gains on privately held equity investments. It can be inferred that these “paper gains” primarily refer to AI model builder Anthropic — a major competitor to ChatGPT creator OpenAI — and possibly, to a lesser extent, SpaceX. Alphabet is a significant investor in these two high-growth companies, which could yield substantial returns for Alphabet once they go public.
The best metric to gauge Alphabet’s operating performance is operating profit. For the quarter, operating profit was $39.7 billion, up 30% year-over-year.
CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted one particularly outstanding figure during the earnings call: “Our backlog nearly doubled sequentially, exceeding $460 billion.” Note that this is sequential growth, not year-over-year. This astonishing backlog growth bodes very well for Google Cloud’s growth prospects for at least the next several years.
Pichai also disclosed a new revenue stream during the earnings call: “As demand for TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) continues to grow from AI labs, capital market firms, and high-performance computing applications, we will begin delivering TPUs in hardware configurations to select customers’ data centers to expand our addressable market opportunity.”
In April, the company launched its eighth-generation TPU, specifically optimized for AI training (TPU v8t) and AI inference (TPU v8i) respectively. Previously, TPUs were only available for customers to rent through Google Cloud. This strategic move poses a potential challenge to Nvidia, the leader in data center AI chips, and its graphics processing units.
Overall, Alphabet is performing well in both its consumer-facing and enterprise-facing businesses. Its plan to begin selling TPUs will provide a new revenue stream. Furthermore, early investments in Anthropic and SpaceX should generate considerable returns. The company’s stock is worth considering for investors.
