Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) closed Monday's session at $337.42, sitting within roughly 3% of its 52-week and all-time high of $349. For a $4 trillion company navigating a volatile macro environment, that kind of resilience speaks volumes. The stock is up about 8% year to date, outpacing many of its mega-cap peers, and the fundamental story underpinning that performance keeps getting more compelling. The news flow over the prior week has given investors further reasons to pay close attention.
Alphabet Is Building the AI Chip Supply Chain of the Future
Reports emerged on April 20 that GOOGL is in talks with Marvell Technology (NASDAQ: MRVL) to co-develop two new AI chips. The first is a memory processing unit designed to work alongside Google's existing Tensor Processing Units. The second is a new TPU built specifically for inference, the phase of AI computing where trained models actually serve responses to users, which is rapidly becoming the dominant compute cost for AI companies at scale.
The market reaction was immediate. Marvell surged almost 6% on the news. Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), Google's existing primary TPU design partner, dipped almost 2% on concerns about potential displacement. But the more nuanced read is this: Google is not replacing Broadcom; instead, it is diversifying.
The company already works with Broadcom on high-performance chip variants and with MediaTek on cost-optimized versions. Adding Marvell as a third design partner, focused specifically on memory and inference, reflects a sophisticated and deliberate strategy to build a more resilient, multi-vendor AI chip supply chain.
In a competitive landscape where AI compute demand is outstripping supply at every level, that diversification is a competitive advantage, not a sign of instability.
This announcement comes just days before Google Cloud Next, the company's annual enterprise AI conference taking place April 22 to 24 in Las Vegas, where a new TPU architecture is expected to debut. The timing underscores how rapidly Alphabet is moving across multiple fronts.
The Ironwood Foundation and a $175 Billion Commitment
The Marvell talks build on a substantial foundation. Google's seventh-generation TPU, Ironwood, delivers 42.5 exaflops of compute across a 9,216-chip superpod, with four times better performance per chip and 192 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) per chip compared to its predecessor. Google has described it as the first TPU designed for the age of inference, and it is already in commercial deployment. Anthropic and Meta (NASDAQ: META) have committed to acquiring substantial amounts of TPUs through deals valued in the billions.
Underpinning all of this is Alphabet's 2026 capital expenditure commitment of $175 billion to $185 billion, nearly double the $91.4 billion spent in 2025. The allocation is roughly 60% to servers and 40% to data centers. This level of infrastructure investment is not speculative. It is demand-backed, supported by a Google Cloud backlog of signed but undelivered contracts totaling $240 billion. That segment, Google Cloud, grew 48% year over year to $17.7 billion in Q4 2025, and analysts expect that growth to exceed 50% in the year ahead.
The Fundamentals Back Up the Stock
Alphabet's most recent quarterly results, reported Feb. 4, were a clean beat across the board. Revenue of $113.83 billion came in ahead of the $111.24 billion consensus. Earnings per share of $2.82 beat estimates of $2.57. Net income reached $34.5 billion, with full-year 2025 net income of $132.17 billion. Annual revenue surpassed $400 billion for the first time.
Q1 2026 earnings are due April 29, arriving just days after Google Cloud Next, with the setup heading into that print is constructive. Analysts hold a consensus Moderate Buy rating, with a price target of $368.94, implying close to 9% upside from current levels.
With GOOGL trading within 3% of its 52-week high, the stock is not cheap on an absolute basis. But for investors looking at the convergence of a dominant cloud business accelerating through 50% growth, a proprietary AI chip stack being built out across multiple design partners, $175 billion in infrastructure spending backed by real contracted demand, and a forward earnings multiple that remains fair and attractive, the case for continued leadership is certainly compelling.
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The article "Here's Why the AI Infrastructure Story Is Just Getting Bigger for GOOGL" first appeared on MarketBeat.
