Why GOOGL Stayed a Core Holding in a Sky-High AI Market

GOOGL ranked 3rd in daily ticker discussion with strong bullish sentiment.
Value investors cited Alphabet among core holdings in a concentrated portfolio that has returned 65.8% YTD.
News of custom AI chip development at Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft is reshaping the cloud competitive landscape.

On Sunday,

$GOOGL held the third-highest volume of retail-investor discussion on Reddit. With 387 comments and a sentiment score of 0.525, the conversation was less about a single catalyst and more about where Alphabet fits in a market that is rapidly re-rating everything from cloud services to AI chip supply chains.

The Value Case for Holding GOOGL

A popular post on r/ValueInvesting laid out a methodology called the Value Score — comparing projected revenue growth and trailing operating margin against the enterprise multiple. The author, who reported a 65.8% year-to-date return, listed

$GOOGL as one of just six holdings alongside

$NVDA,

$MSFT, and

$META. Despite Friday's broad pullback, the model's signal was clear: keep holding.

That patience resonated across the platform. In r/stocks, a user managing a mostly

$VOO portfolio said they were comfortable holding their existing positions in

$MSFT,

$AMZN, and

$GOOGL while expressing discomfort over new AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX that they viewed as overvalued. The post captured a broader sentiment: the mega-cap tech names feel like known quantities, while the next wave of AI IPOs is stirring unease.

Cloud Chip Competition Heats Up

Same-day reporting from The Motley Fool underscored a key development: Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft are each racing to design their own AI chips to reduce dependence on

$NVDA. The four major cloud giants are expected to spend roughly $725 billion on capex in 2026. For Alphabet, that means Google's custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) could play a bigger role in its data centers, potentially improving margins over time.

The same outlet also compared the three cloud leaders, calling Amazon the best buy of the moment because AWS already generates 59% of operating profits and is growing at 28%. But it noted that Google Cloud remains a strong beneficiary of AI demand — a long-term tailwind that Reddit's value-focused investors seem willing to wait for.

GOOGL

$GOOGL

Reddit's AI Valuation Skepticism

A recurring theme in Sunday's

$GOOGL discussion was the broader question of whether AI companies are fairly priced. Two posts on r/ValueInvesting challenged the

$SPACEX IPO valuation of $1.75 trillion, calling it an “impossible bar” that would require 60x revenue growth in a decade. A separate post on r/stockmarket argued that the company's bull case mirrors Tesla's “dilution playbook”—selling stock rather than generating fundamental returns.

Amid that skepticism,

$GOOGL stands out as a business with proven earnings, a growing cloud segment, and the financial flexibility to invest in custom silicon. For the Reddit investors who dominated Sunday's discussion, that combination looks a lot safer than betting on a $1 trillion IPO.

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