New York, Feb 12, 2026, 10:25 (EST) — Regular session
- Alphabet’s Class C shares rose in morning trade after a steep drop in the prior session
- EU regulators cleared Google’s Wiz acquisition, removing a key antitrust hurdle
- Investors remain focused on how Alphabet funds — and profits from — its AI buildout
Alphabet Inc’s Class C shares (GOOG) rose 0.4% to $312.47 on Thursday morning, after swinging between $310.39 and $313.54. The stock values the Google parent at about $2.9 trillion.
Debt markets have become part of the story. Alphabet this week sold a rare 100-year sterling bond, raising £1 billion at a 6.125% coupon inside a broader $31.51 billion global bond raise, deal memos showed, a move investors read as another marker of how capital-heavy the AI race is getting. “That’s representative and indicative of a lot of the capital spending,” said Jason Granet, chief investment officer at BNY, while analysts at Covenant Review wrote the bonds had “no meaningful restrictive covenants” — guardrails in bond contracts that can limit leverage or protect lenders. (Reuters)
Regulators offered a clearer signal on Alphabet’s biggest deal. The European Union gave unconditional antitrust approval for Google’s $32 billion purchase of cybersecurity firm Wiz, a transaction announced in March last year that would deepen Google’s security push inside its cloud business. EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera said customers would still have “credible alternatives and the ability to switch providers” in cloud infrastructure, where Google competes with larger rivals Amazon and Microsoft. (Reuters)
Still, Brussels has not gone quiet. The European Publishers Council filed an EU antitrust complaint over Google’s AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries in Search — saying it was “about stopping a dominant gatekeeper” from taking content without consent or fair compensation, EPC chairman Christian Van Thillo said. Google called the claims “inaccurate” and said it was looking at controls to let sites manage how their content is used in generative AI features. (Reuters)
Alphabet’s Class C shares closed down 2.29% on Wednesday at $311.33, extending a two-day slide and lagging several megacap peers on a mixed day for U.S. stocks, MarketWatch data showed. (MarketWatch)
On Thursday, Alphabet was an outlier early, with Microsoft down about 0.8%, Amazon off roughly 1.3% and Meta lower by about 1.2%.
Broader indexes opened modestly higher, with the S&P 500 up 0.23% and the Nasdaq up 0.33%. (Reuters)
U.S. labor data stayed in the frame. Weekly jobless claims fell 5,000 to 227,000, but came in above economists’ forecast of 222,000; “Layoffs … are not signaling a weakening labor market or economic decay,” said Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. (Reuters)
For Alphabet and other growth stocks, interest-rate expectations can bite quickly. Higher bond yields tend to weigh on richly valued tech by shrinking the present value of future profits.
But the risk case is not hard to sketch. If AI spending keeps climbing faster than the payoffs, or if regulators tighten the screws on how Google uses content and data, the stock can give back gains even with solid ad demand.
The next near-term catalyst is Friday’s U.S. consumer price index report for January, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. EST, a release that often ripples through Treasury yields and the Nasdaq. (Bls)
