Jim Cramer crowns Alphabet the hyperscale earnings winner, sees more upside ahead
CNBC’s Jim Cramer didn’t hesitate to crown Alphabet as the clear winner in Wednesday night’s barrage of Big Tech earnings. “The Google call – Alphabet was an extraordinary call,” Jim said on ” Squawk on the Street ” on Thursday. “I think with the stock at $370 its going to right to $400,” he added. Jim ranked Alphabet as the top performer among the four mega-cap reports, followed by Amazon , Microsoft , and Meta Platforms . Almost every single Wall Street firm raised price targets on Alphabet stock “rather dramatically,” Jim observed. The endorsements came after Alphabet delivered a stellar first quarter that crushed both revenue and earnings estimates on a high bar. A day after the report, the stock rallied more than 7% to what would be another record-high close. Alphabet is the best “Magnificent Seven” stock year-to-date, up nearly 20%. During the quarter, the company showed continued momentum in artificial intelligence initiatives while increasing hefty capital expenditures as it continues to build out its AI infrastructure. Spending guidance went up a bit, too. But investors were not worried because the company showed a return on investment. ROI scrutiny weighed on several of Alphabet’s peers, particularly Meta, whose stock fell more than 9.5% Thursday after the social media giant said it will raise capex. In Jim’s view, Alphabet stands apart because it has a cloud and Meta does not. GOOGL YTD mountain GOOGL stock performance YTD. Google Cloud growth accelerated alongside rising demand for AI-powered services. Management pointed to a rapidly expanding backlog — that nearly doubled to $460 billion — and increased enterprise adoption, with the first-time inclusion of its in-demand tensor processing units (TPUs) chip sales in the backlog. The core Google Search business is evolving, with AI-enhanced insight to queries alongside traditional answers improving user engagement and ad performance. This offered a burst of much needed faith into that segment since just a year ago investors thought that business was going to be eaten by the rise of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and others. The company also demonstrated its push deeper into enterprise AI with Gemini, its flagship AI model, is paying off. Its offerings, which include Gemini Enterprise, are designed to help businesses build and deploy AI applications, and opens up a new revenue stream for Alphabet outside of its core ad business.
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