New York, Feb 23, 2026, 07:08 (EST) — Premarket
Alphabet shares rose 0.3% to $315.89 in premarket trading on Monday after Wells Fargo upgraded the Google parent. The stock closed at $314.98 on Friday. (Public)
The broker moved Alphabet to “Overweight” from “Equal Weight” and raised its price target to $387 from $354. Overweight is Wall Street shorthand for expecting a stock to beat its peers. (TipRanks)
The call matters now because investors are looking for signs that heavy spending on artificial intelligence can turn into durable revenue, not just bigger bills. Alphabet sits in the middle of that argument, with ads funding a cloud and AI buildout that is still ramping.
Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski wrote that Google has “leadership” in data, distribution and compute capacity, and said the bottleneck is how fast the industry can add computing power. The bank said its framework implies total compute capacity could reach 35 gigawatts by 2028 from 15 gigawatts at year-end 2025, while it lifted its forecast for Google Cloud Platform revenue growth to 60% in 2026. Wells Fargo also projected Gemini subscriptions could grow to $12 billion in annual recurring revenue — an annualized subscription yardstick — while warning the AI-search shift remains a swing risk for the business model. (Investing.com South Africa)
Alphabet’s small gain came against a softer premarket tape. U.S. index futures slipped after President Donald Trump announced a new 15% global duty even after the Supreme Court struck down most of his broader tariff moves, and Arthur Laffer Jr., president of Laffer Tengler Investments, said companies struggle when they don’t know “what the tariffs are going to look like.” (Reuters)
Tariff churn matters for tech because it can hit corporate planning and, in turn, spending on advertising and cloud projects. Alphabet also competes head-to-head with Amazon and Microsoft for enterprise AI workloads, where capacity and pricing can move quickly.
Alphabet has already told investors it plans to spend heavily on servers and data centers this year, even as some shareholders question the payoff. “We are seeing our AI investments and infrastructure drive revenue and growth across the board,” CEO Sundar Pichai said earlier this month, as the company forecast 2026 capital spending of $175 billion to $185 billion. (Reuters)
Still, the stock can cut the other way if trade policy drags on growth, or if the AI buildout keeps stretching cash flow while competition intensifies. Any sign that search or ad pricing is wobbling would likely land poorly in a market already jumpy about valuations.
Investors’ next near-term marker is Tuesday at 12:01 a.m. EST, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it will stop collecting the emergency-law tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal and deactivate the related tariff codes. The agency offered no timeline for potential refunds, even as the administration moves ahead with a new 15% global tariff under a different legal authority. (Reuters)
