Google Stock Price Surges to Record Highs as Cloud Backlog Doubles Overnight

Watching Google stock at the moment is peculiar in some way. It’s not the price per se, but it has been rising in ways that seem almost dramatic. It’s the discourse surrounding it, the way analysts continue to raise their goals, the way the chart continues to brush against ceilings it hasn’t touched since late 2021, and the way regular investors who had written off mega-cap tech are surreptitiously checking the ticker once more. Monday’s closing price for Alphabet was 379.64, barely below its 52-week high of 384.18. That comes after a month in which the stock increased by almost 34%, making April its best since 2004, when the majority of people were still learning what a search engine was.

On paper, the April 29 Q1 earnings report served as the catalyst. Revenue exceeded almost all projections, coming in at 109.9 billion dollars, up 22% year over year. The real work was done by Google Cloud, which grew 63% to 20 billion. Although it’s important to note that a significant portion of earnings per share came from unrealized gains on private equity stakes, particularly Anthropic and SpaceX, earnings per share ended up at 5.11 compared to an anticipated 2.63. The cleaner figure, operating income, increased by 30%. These kinds of numbers don’t simply disappear without making an impression.

However, the Cloud backlog was the statistic that actually seemed to halt people in their tracks. It increased from 243 billion to over 468 billion, almost doubling from the previous quarter. Doug Anmuth of J.P. Morgan described it as the most impressive metric of the entire earnings season, and the sell side does not use language like that carelessly. Within two years, it is anticipated that more than half of that backlog will turn into revenue. Whether it truly does is a different matter, and no one seems to be prepared to provide an answer.

The chip story comes next. Alphabet declared that it will begin selling its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, directly to a limited number of clients. Up until now, Google Cloud was the only way to rent those chips. Selling them outright would be a covert declaration of war against Nvidia, which has long controlled the story of AI chips. It’s the kind of action that seems insignificant in a press release but huge in hindsight. When Tesla began producing its own batteries, it encountered similar skepticism.

Naturally, not everyone is buying the rally. Citing a 12-year upward channel that the stock has now pressed against for the first time since shortly before the 2022 bear market, a trading analyst writing under the handle TradingShot suggested on TradingView that Google could correct by as much as 45% in the upcoming months. The analyst contended that the pattern is similar to the late 2021 topping behavior. They might be correct. They might also be reading too much into a chart. Depending on the week, markets can make technical purists appear either brilliant or stupid.

The magnitude of Alphabet’s commitments is more difficult to ignore. In 2026, the company intends to spend up to 190 billion dollars on capital projects, which is more than it spent over the previous three years put together. Just months after raising nearly 32 billion in dollars, sterling, and Swiss francs, it has begun a six-part euro bond offering. Google seems to be building the foundation for the next empire rather than merely defending its current one. Every shareholder is now silently questioning whether the returns outweigh the expenditures.

It’s difficult to ignore how different this situation feels from the post-ChatGPT panic of 2023, when Google appeared sluggish and unresponsive. Since then, the stock has more than doubled. This year’s legacy will likely depend on whether that ascent continues or whether the technicians discover something that the fundamentals overlooked.