As of the third quarter, Pershing Square Capital Management allocates 10.52% of its portfolio to Alphabet, underscoring hedge-fund legend Bill Ackman’s conviction in the search-giant’s long-term growth. Ackman’s fund has maintained this position through multiple market cycles, citing Alphabet’s dominant share of the global search market (over 90%) and its rapid expansion in cloud infrastructure. The stock’s resilience—trading at roughly 33 times forward earnings, below its five-year average—reflects investor confidence in the firm’s core advertising business and cloud segment.

Alphabet’s cloud division reported a record backlog of $155 billion at the end of the third quarter, a 46% increase sequentially. This backlog—comprising contracted future revenues for Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace—now represents roughly 20% of the company’s annual revenue run rate. In the same period, cloud revenues grew by 34% year-over-year, outpacing the 12% growth in total company revenues. Strong adoption by enterprise and AI-focused clients, coupled with ongoing investments in data-centre capacity, positions Google Cloud as a top-three global cloud provider.

Alphabet’s quantum research team achieved a major milestone with the Willow quantum chip, demonstrating exponential error-rate reductions as qubit counts scale. In late 2024, the firm ran a verifiable quantum algorithm on Willow that outperformed the most powerful classical supercomputers for the same task, marking a key step toward practical quantum advantage. Alphabet has committed more than $2 billion to its quantum hardware and software roadmap, and continues to recruit top talent to accelerate commercialization of quantum-accelerated AI models.

Over the past decade, Alphabet has repurchased approximately $342 billion of its own shares, making it second only to Apple among S&P 500 companies in cumulative buybacks. In the last twelve months alone, the company spent over $35 billion on share repurchases, reducing its outstanding share count by nearly 5%. This aggressive buyback program, enabled by free cash flow exceeding $60 billion annually, has boosted earnings per share by more than 20% since 2022 and signaled management’s commitment to returning capital to investors.