In today's capital markets, if you haven't made it into the $4 trillion club, you don't really get to walk tall. The club currently has exactly two diamond members: NVIDIA ($4.77T) and a freshly re-enthroned Alphabet ($4.01T).
In this war for the AI crown, some are betting on the brute-force beauty of GPUs. My own conviction: this war is ultimately won by the company that owns the whole stack. Here's the full case.
1. Google's "Swiss Army Knife" Playbook: It's Not Just Search Anymore
Stop thinking of Google as a search engine that serves ads. Alphabet's current lineup is basically the AI Avengers:
- Gemini — frontier large language model
- DeepMind — the research lab shipping production-grade breakthroughs
- Waymo — already several lengths ahead of Tesla in autonomous driving
- YouTube — the world's largest streaming video platform
And they hold a hidden trump card: SpaceX equity. Reports suggest the SpaceX IPO could deliver Google an estimated $100 billion return on its stake. NVIDIA's pockets don't contain any Musk rockets.
The most enviable number: Google Cloud's backlog stands at $240 billion, up 55% QoQ. That "too many orders to handle" feeling is what people call a happy problem.
2. Broadcom: The Low-Profile "Top Arms Dealer"
If Google is the frontline general charging into battle, Broadcom (AVGO) is the quartermaster in the rear — handing out weapons, paving the roads, and laying the rail tracks while they're at it. The Google-Broadcom TPU partnership now spans over a decade — less a business relationship, more a childhood friendship in compute.
Broadcom's XPU business is on autopilot:
- Producing TPUs on 2nm for Google this year
- Landed Meta, ByteDance, OpenAI, and Anthropic along the way
- Apple may preach "privacy first" in public, but behind the scenes seems dependent on Broadcom's custom silicon and Google's Gemini
One line summary of Broadcom: the network is the computer. While everyone else scrambles for GPUs, Broadcom's industry-leading Tomahawk switches and SerDes technology solve the fatal data bottleneck inside AI clusters.
3. The 2027 Thesis: From "Training" to "Inference" — the Great Power Transfer
The market is currently obsessed with the NVIDIA-dominated training market. My bold prediction: by the end of 2027, Alphabet overtakes NVIDIA as the world's most valuable company.
The reasoning is straightforward:
- Training is just the beginning; inference is the real final frontier. Training is one-time CapEx; inference is eternal OpEx. A customer who trains a model can turn the GPUs off. But every single user query to that model is real revenue on the inference side.