New York, Feb 27, 2026, 10:44 (EST) — Regular session
- Alphabet Class C shares up about 0.6% at $308.83; stock closed down 1.9% on Thursday
- South Korea approved Google’s bid to export high-precision map data under strict security conditions
- Belgium opened an antitrust probe into Google’s online ad pricing practices
Alphabet’s Class C shares (GOOG), which carry no voting rights, were up 0.55% at $308.83 by 10:44 a.m. EST on Friday, recovering some ground after a 1.88% slide in the previous session. 1
The move comes with U.S. tech stocks under pressure again. Wall Street’s main indexes opened lower on Friday as “AI anxiety” and hotter-than-expected inflation data weighed on sentiment, with the Nasdaq set for its steepest monthly drop since March 2025, Reuters reported. 2
One tailwind for Google landed in Asia. South Korea approved Google’s request to export high-precision map data to overseas servers — a reversal of a two-decade stance — provided Google meets security conditions such as blurring sensitive sites and restricting coordinates, and processes map data on local servers. “We welcome today’s decision,” Google Vice President Cris Turner said. 3
Investors have also been watching whether Google can turn its in-house hardware into cloud revenue. Meta Platforms (META) signed a multi-billion dollar, multi-year deal to rent Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, to develop AI models, The Information reported, in a pact that would pit Google’s chips more directly against Nvidia’s dominant GPUs. 4
The gains came with a fresh regulatory overhang in Europe. Belgium’s competition watchdog said it opened an investigation into the sale of online ads by Google, saying it had “serious indications” the company’s ad-selling model could breach antitrust rules; the probe is preliminary and the outcome is unclear. 5
Alphabet has also been pulling more experimental work closer to its core business. Intrinsic, the robotics software company founded as an Alphabet “Other Bet,” said it has joined Google to build “physical AI” tools for industrial customers; “Combined with Google’s AI and infrastructure, we’re going to unlock the promise of physical AI,” Intrinsic CEO Wendy Tan White said. 6
But the push-and-pull is familiar for Alphabet: more scrutiny on advertising, more spending on AI, and a market that is suddenly less forgiving on growth stocks when rates might stay higher. U.S. producer prices rose 0.5% in January, a hotter print that can feed into the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, and the official PCE inflation report is expected on March 13. 7
Next up, traders will listen for fresh color on AI returns and capital spending when Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi speaks at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom conference on March 3 at 3:20 p.m. Eastern Time, the company said. 8
