Apple "eaten up"

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, closed Wednesday with a market capitalization of $3.88 trillion. Alphabet shares rose more than 2% on Wednesday, ending at $322.03. Meanwhile, Apple’s market capitalization closed Wednesday at $3.84 trillion, with its shares falling over 4%.

Alphabet jumped to second place on Wednesday, and the gap between the two companies widened on Thursday as Alphabet shares continued to rise while Apple shares declined for the sixth consecutive day.

This shift in market capitalization clearly highlights the diverging paths Alphabet and Apple are taking in their strategies related to artificial intelligence.

Alphabet ended 2025 as one of the top performers on Wall Street, thanks to its return to the AI industry. In November, it introduced Ironwood, the seventh generation of its tensor processing chips, considered potential competition for Nvidia products. Then in December, Google unveiled Gemini 3, which received rave reviews, according to CNBC.

Alphabet shares rose 65% in 2025, marking the company’s biggest increase since 2009, when its stock doubled following the financial crisis.

CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly emphasized that the company is responding to a huge surge in demand. At the October earnings conference, he said that Google Cloud signed more contracts worth over $1 billion in 2025 through the third quarter than it had in the previous two years combined.

In contrast, Apple has largely been absent from the AI race that began when OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022.

Apple had planned to introduce a new generation of its AI assistant Siri last year, but the launch was delayed. The company has promised to release a “more personal Siri” in 2026.

Wall Street firm Raymond James downgraded Apple this week, noting that it will be difficult for the company to achieve higher gains in 2026.