By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CN

Google is officially a $2 trillion company

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2024-04-26 21:00:04

By Sean Hollister , a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Google has spent the past year dealing with two of the biggest threats in its 25-year history: the rise of generative AI and the growing drumbeat of regulation. AI, in particular, has shaken the company to its core: it’s made big search changes, realigned the Search, Android, and hardware teams around AI, and launched its own Gemini AI model to capitalize on the opportunity.

Google execs cut projects and laid off employees to refocus, and yesterday, it announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion share buyback alongside its Q1 2024 earnings.

Investors, at least, are eating it up: Google parent company Alphabet has finally officially hit and maintained a $2 trillion market cap for a whole day of trading after briefly touching $2 trillion in November 2021. Google is the fourth most valuable public company in the world, behind Nvidia ($2.2 trillion), Apple ($2.6 trillion), and Microsoft ($3.0 trillion). Amazon is currently at $1.8 trillion, and Meta is at $1.1 trillion.

Unlike Meta, whose stock price fell 10 percent after Mark Zuckerberg said it would take years to make money in “massive” bets on generative AI, Google said yesterday that it’s already finding some small ways to sell it — for example, it’s helping advertisers target people with AI in its Performance Max tool and that those advertisers are “63 percent more likely to publish a campaign with good or excellent ad strength.”