NEW YORK, Feb 19, 2026, 11:34 ET — Regular session.
Alphabet Inc’s Class C shares (GOOG) hovered up 0.4% at $305.29 late Thursday morning. The Nasdaq 100 tracker QQQ and S&P 500 ETF SPY barely budged. Google announced it’s teaming up with Sea Ltd to test out an “agentic” AI shopping prototype for Shopee, which captured 52% of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market in 2024. The two will also look to bring AI tools to Sea’s Garena gaming arm. Reuters
It’s a shaky environment right now. AI-related megacaps are all over the map as traders debate if big outlays on artificial intelligence are really paying off. Sentiment feels fragile—things can turn on a dime. “So on any given day, the bias switches very fast and that’s a great indicator of overall investor nervousness,” said Kim Forrest, founder and chief investment officer at Bokeh Capital. Reuters
Nvidia’s announcement of a multi-year agreement to supply millions of AI chips to Meta Platforms perked up sentiment on Wednesday, with Wall Street closing in positive territory. The AI sector’s earlier shakiness gave way to a rebound in risk appetite. “They were expensive and they’ve gotten cheaper,” said Ross Mayfield, investment strategy analyst at Baird, referring to tech stocks. Reuters
Sea, the parent of Shopee and Garena, announced that its broadened partnership with Google now includes payment integration via its financial unit, Monee. Forrest Li, Sea’s chairman and CEO, described the initiative as a move to “drive innovation” at scale using AI. On Google’s side, Asia-Pacific president Sanjay Gupta said the tie-up targets “unlocking” the region’s digital potential. Sea added that Monee is set to work on Google’s open-source Agent Payments Protocol, advancing “agentic” payments—software that executes transactions and tasks, not just responds to queries. The Business Times
Alphabet grabbed attention beyond advertising and cloud this week. Its autonomous vehicle arm, Waymo, responded to U.S. lawmakers, saying it hasn’t used remote driving to run its robotaxis on public streets, following scrutiny over remote assistance workers, some located in the Philippines. According to the company, U.S.-based staff can, in rare situations, nudge a stopped car forward at roughly 2 mph just to clear a lane, but they added this has only happened during training.
YouTube experienced a short-lived outage, with the company pointing to an issue in its recommendation system that kept videos from loading on the platform. The disruption, confirmed by Downdetector, left over 320,000 U.S. users unable to access content at its height, according to Reuters. The company said the problem has been fixed.
Still, regulation—particularly on the advertising side—remains a persistent overhang for the stock. The European Commission recently raised questions about whether Google could be artificially inflating “clearing prices” in its Search ad auctions, and it’s soliciting advertiser input through March 2. No formal probe yet. Google’s response: prices are dictated by real-time auctions based on competition and ad quality. Reuters
Focus shifts to the macro picture. Friday brings December’s U.S. PCE inflation report — the Federal Reserve’s go-to measure. Traders scanning for rate hints that can jolt megacap tech names like Alphabet.
