Google-Parent Alphabet Dethrones Apple To Become World's Second-Most Valuable Company

Alphabet’s stock rose more than 2% on Wednesday, Jan. 7, pushing the Google parent company’s market capitalization to $3.89 trillion, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The rise in market cap has led Alphabet to become the world's second-most valuable company, dethroning Apple.

Apple now commands a market cap of about $3.85 trillion after a fractional decline in its stock price in the session. AI-chip making titan Nvidia is still by far the biggest US company by market cap, worth more than $4.6 trillion.

Alphabet's stock has risen 66% in the last one year after Google joined the AI race and picked pace in the ecosystem with its free AI-assistant tool Gemini. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other large-language models did not weigh on the dominance cemented by Google Search, which has gained user trust and reliability in the last three decades.

Meanwhile, Apple has struggled to convince investors of its AI positioning. It has also delayed AI features and is seen as being behind other Big Tech players when it comes to AI innovation, according to MarketWatch.

The S&P 500 settled lower on Wednesday, dragged by financial stocks such as JPMorgan, Blackstone and others, while Nvidia and Alphabet lifted the tech-heavy Nasdaq as investors shifted toward AI-related stocks. Drops in S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average followed intraday record highs earlier in the session.

As per Reuters, heading into fourth-quarter earnings season in the next few weeks, valuations on Wall Street remain relatively pricey. S&P 500 is trading at about 22 times expected earnings, down from 23 in November, but above the index's five-year average of 19, according to LSEG data.

S&P 500 fell 0.34% to end the session at 6,920.93 points on Wednesday. Nasdaq gained 0.16% to 23,584.28, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.94% to 48,996.08 points. The volume on the US stock exchanges was relatively heavy, with 17.4 billion shares traded, compared to an average of 16.2 billion shares over the previous 20 sessions.