NEW YORK, Feb 19, 2026, 11:34 ET — Regular session.
Alphabet Inc’s Class C shares (GOOG) were up about 0.4% at $305.29 in late morning trade on Thursday, while the Nasdaq 100 tracker QQQ and the S&P 500 ETF SPY were little changed. Google said it will work with Sea Ltd to explore an “agentic” AI shopping prototype for Shopee, which held a 52% share of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market in 2024, and to apply AI tools to Sea’s Garena gaming unit. (Reuters)
The backdrop is jittery. AI-linked megacaps have been bouncing as investors question whether hefty AI spending is translating into revenue and profit, and a soft patch in sentiment can flip quickly. “So on any given day, the bias switches very fast and that’s a great indicator of overall investor nervousness,” Kim Forrest, founder and chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital, said. (Reuters)
Wednesday looked different. Wall Street finished higher after Nvidia said it had signed a multi-year deal to sell millions of AI chips to Meta Platforms, helping steady risk appetite after earlier stumbles in the AI trade. “They were expensive and they’ve gotten cheaper,” Ross Mayfield, an investment strategy analyst at Baird, said of tech shares. (Reuters)
Sea, which runs Shopee and Garena, said the expanded partnership with Google will also cover payments through its financial services arm, Monee. Sea chairman and CEO Forrest Li called the effort a way to “drive innovation” with AI “at scale,” while Google Asia-Pacific president Sanjay Gupta said the companies aim to “unlock” Southeast Asia’s digital potential. Sea said Monee will collaborate on Google’s open-source Agent Payments Protocol, part of a push toward “agentic” payments — software designed to carry out tasks and transactions, not just answer questions. (The Business Times)
Alphabet has had other headlines this week, too, away from ads and cloud. Its self-driving unit Waymo told U.S. lawmakers it has not used remote driving to operate robotaxis on public roads, after questions about remote assistance workers, including some based in the Philippines. The company said U.S.-based personnel could, in rare cases, prompt a stopped vehicle to move forward at about 2 mph to clear a lane, though it said that has not happened outside training. (Reuters)
YouTube also had a brief outage. The video platform said it resolved a problem tied to its recommendation system that prevented videos from appearing across YouTube surfaces, after Downdetector showed widespread disruption. At the peak, more than 320,000 users in the United States reported problems, Reuters reported. (Reuters)
But the risk that tends to stick to the stock is regulation, especially around advertising. The European Commission has flagged concerns that Google may be artificially raising “clearing prices” in Search ad auctions and asked advertisers for feedback by March 2, though it has not opened a formal investigation. Google has said prices are set by real-time auctions that reflect competition and ad quality. (Reuters)
What’s next is macro, not just company news. Traders are watching Friday’s U.S. inflation data — the December Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report, the Federal Reserve’s preferred price gauge — for clues on interest-rate direction that can swing valuations across megacap tech, including Alphabet. (Reuters)
