Alphabet briefly surpassed Nvidia as the world's most valuable company on May 13, 2026 after posting a $462B cloud backlog and sealing a five-year, $200B Anthropic infrastructure deal that drew comparisons to Microsoft's early OpenAI bet.
The milestone underscores how quickly the AI capital race has reshuffled the large-cap leaderboard. GOOGL is up roughly 160% over the prior twelve months, according to CNBC, while the stock's move highlights what owning most of the AI stack can mean for valuation.
What happened
Anthropic committed to spending up to $200B over five years on Google Cloud compute, anchored by custom TPU capacity of up to 5 GW, in a deal that Fortune and CNBC reported around May 10. Alphabet simultaneously disclosed that 2026 capital expenditures would reach $180B to $190B, up from prior guidance, and that Google Cloud's annualized revenue run rate now implies 63% year-over-year growth. The combination of backlog size, growth rate and the Anthropic anchor agreement pushed GOOGL shares high enough to briefly displace NVDA at the top of the market-cap rankings.
Why it matters
The market cap crossing is a signal that investors are now pricing the hyperscalers as AI infrastructure platforms rather than advertising or search businesses. For Nvidia, it is the first credible challenge from a non-chip company since the AI rally began in 2023. For Alphabet, it validates the thesis that controlling cloud, silicon and a frontier-model partner creates a defensible position in the AI spend cycle.
Market impact
GOOGL's 160% twelve-month rally, per CNBC, has been driven by repricing the Google Cloud segment and by Anthropic's commercial momentum. The $462B backlog number is the clearest evidence that enterprise AI commitments are multi-year and capital-intensive. Nvidia was not dethroned permanently — its GPU franchise still faces no serious substitute — but the episode shows the hyperscaler bloc can compress the valuation gap when deal flow accelerates.