New York, February 18, 2026, 10:38 (EST) — Regular session
- Alphabet’s Class C shares (GOOG), which don’t carry voting rights, hovered up roughly 0.1% around $303.
- Traders brace for the Fed’s January meeting minutes, set to land at 2 p.m. ET.
- Waymo fired back at lawmakers, YouTube saw a short-lived outage, and Google’s appetite for data centers is now driving a geothermal pact in Nevada.
Alphabet Inc’s Class C shares (GOOG) ticked 0.1% higher to $303.12 Wednesday morning on the Nasdaq, just above their $302.15 open. Shares previously settled at $302.82, moving between $302.11 and $305.54 since the bell.
Alphabet shares edged higher, following U.S. markets upward as investors held off ahead of the Federal Reserve’s January meeting minutes, set for release at 2 p.m. ET. “We have not really seen much of a drawdown, just a lot of daily volatility,” said Sam Stovall, CFRA’s chief investment strategist. Early in the session, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all rose roughly 0.24%, according to Reuters. (Reuters)
AI buildout costs are still casting a shadow over megacap tech. UBS now sees U.S. tech investment-grade bond issuance hitting $360 billion in 2026, up from its prior view, while “hyperscaler” capital expenditures—think the major cloud operators building out vast data centers—might run up to $770 billion. Alphabet’s recent bond sales in CHF and GBP suggest U.S. tech giants will keep tapping markets abroad for their capex needs, UBS analysts said. (Reuters)
Waymo, the self-driving arm of Alphabet, is under Congressional scrutiny, too. Responding to Senator Ed Markey, the company stated it hasn’t used remote driving—or so-called “tele-operations”—to carry out driving tasks on U.S. roads. Remote assistants, according to Waymo, “do not directly control, steer, or drive the vehicle.” There are, however, occasional exceptions: Waymo acknowledged that U.S.-based staff might tell a stopped AV to inch forward at 2 mph, but only briefly, and never outside of training scenarios. (Reuters)
YouTube, part of Alphabet, said it’s fixed a blip with its recommendations system that temporarily stopped videos from showing up on the platform. “The issue with our recommendations system has been resolved,” the company said. Downdetector recorded over 320,000 outage reports in the U.S. at the height of the disruption. (Reuters)
Google’s energy requirements are under the microscope again. Ormat Technologies has inked a long-term geothermal power deal with NV Energy, aimed at powering Google’s Nevada operations. The agreement calls for 150 megawatts of fresh capacity to roll out sometime between 2028 and 2030. “By adding up to 150MW of new clean-firm geothermal capacity in Nevada … we are utilizing a repeatable framework,” Briana Kobor, Google’s head of energy market innovation, said, referring to always-on, carbon-free electricity. (Reuters)
Some heavyweight investors have started dialing back on the “Magnificent 7” AI stocks, with valuations back under the microscope. In the last quarter, Tiger Global and Adage Capital both pared down their stakes in several AI-heavy megacaps, 13F filings show. Adage also trimmed its Alphabet position a bit. (Reuters)
Stocks managed to shake off a rough start and close a bit higher Tuesday, but the mood stayed twitchy. “There’s a lot of different trends going on … you see spikes up and spikes down,” said Tim Ghriskey, senior portfolio strategist at Ingalls & Snyder. Indexes may look stable, but that’s not what’s happening beneath the surface. (Reuters)
For Alphabet and the rest of tech, the real worry is a sharper shift in rate expectations. The Fed left its key rate unchanged in the 3.5% to 3.75% band at the Jan. 16–17 meeting, with Chair Jerome Powell pointing to “broad support” for sticking to the current stance. Investors are set to comb through the minutes, looking for just how tough it’ll be to get that next rate cut. If policymakers sound more wary on inflation, that’s likely to hit long-duration growth names the most — particularly those still pouring money into AI infrastructure. (Reuters)
Once the minutes hit, traders are already eyeing Friday’s personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, the inflation metric the Fed follows most closely. The Bureau of Economic Analysis schedules its next update for Feb. 20. (Bea)
