This mega-cap tech hitting a 52-week high is proving to be the next big AI play after Nvidia

Published Wed, Aug 30 202310:33 AM EDTUpdated Wed, Aug 30 202312:08 PM EDT

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Nvidia takes center stage. But investors shouldn't sleep on this mega-cap technology winner hitting highs not seen in over a year on the back of a major artificial intelligence-focused event. Alphabet shares hit a 52-week high Tuesday after showcasing its AI and machine learning capabilities at its annual Cloud Next event. Shares closed up 2.7%. The search giant has benefited from excitement around AI, with shares up more than 53% year to date. Early on, Alphabet proved itself as a dominant name in the AI war , facing off against Microsoft with a competing chatbot, although some fears mounted that it lagged the competition . GOOGL YTD mountain Alphabet shares since the start of 2023 "We continue to believe investors are not giving GOOGL credit for significant public cloud growth or market share gains over the coming years," wrote Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak. "The extent to which AI capabilities can drive upward [Google Cloud Platform] revisions in coming quarters is likely to be positive for the multiple of GOOGL." Wall Street regarded Alphabet's AI hardware advancements as some of the biggest takeaways from the event, reiterating optimism in the company's long-term potential. Along with an expanded partnership with Nvidia for graphics processing units, Alphabet unveiled a new iteration of its tensor processing units to train AI models and unveiled updates to its own large language models and developer capabilities. "These advances in infrastructure speak to significant productivity gains to come and opportunities for developers to build more sophisticated AI products through GCP," and showcase the company's attempts to quickly scale up capabilities and improve the user experience, he said. Nowak isn't alone. Bank of America's Justin Post said the search company was "flexing its AI muscle," adding that its AI capabilities are a major customer selling point and should be a positive driver for the stock. Along with the hardware updates, Alphabet revealed pricing for a suite of AI-powered tools for enterprise customers. At $30 a month, Citi's Ronald Josey called the contribution "material over time," and said the event should mitigate any "remaining overhangs" on Google's Cloud AI capabilities. KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Justin Patterson calculates that a strong AI product cycle could enable Alphabet's cloud segment to sustain year-over-year growth within the mid-20% range through 2025. Cloud scaling remains a "key swing factor" in medium-term revenue and earnings per share revisions, he added. "Overall, the event reinforces Google's strong AI positioning within Cloud, and we expect Google Cloud to remain a key driver of GOOGL's top-line growth & margin improvement," said JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth. Correction: Google shares recently hit a 52-week high. An earlier headline for this story misstated the statistic.