I doubt I need to tell you that artificial intelligence (AI) has been invented i the story of the stock market since ChatGPT went live in November 2022. Since then, I don’t think a day has gone by when the topic hasn’t appeared in financial sources in some way. And now there are dozens, if not hundreds, of AI stocks for an investor to choose from.
But one stands out above all: Google’s parent company, Alphabets (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL). If you’re looking for one stock that lets you play as much AI as possible, Alphabet is it.
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The company is uniquely positioned on both the hardware and software sides of the AI industry, and has been quietly asserting its dominance in the space for years. Now, it seems that its efforts are really starting to bear fruit.
Don’t call it a comeback — Google has been here for years
There’s a very good chance you’ve interacted with Google, or Alphabet’s other big brand, YouTube, in the last 24 hours. And the parent company’s existing business operations with Google and YouTube have given it more resources to tap into its AI projects than anyone else in the tech sector.
It was one of the early tech giants of the dot-com boom, and is shaping up to be a big winner in the AI boom. There are three reasons:
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Alphabetical presence in both AI hardware and software.
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Other companies large and small rely on Alphabet’s AI products.
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Its financial strength allows it to outperform all of its smaller competitors, as well as many of its larger ones.
Let’s get into it.
A full spectrum player
Alphabet’s flagship AI product is the Gemini platform. It competes directly with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and benefits greatly in that space.
According to the business firm Menlo Ventures, in 2023, Google Gemini had only a 7% market share in business major language models (LLMs). It was the youngest player, after the tie Meta. But by the end of 2025, Gemini’s market share had tripled to 21% while Meta’s had dropped to 8%.
Gemini is likely to overtake ChatGPT this year if this trend continues, as the latter dropped from 50% market share in 2023 to 27% in 2025.
Google’s hardware is also amazing. The company’s tensor processing unit (TPU) is a co-developed AI chip Broadcom. The chip is optimized for slightly different things than NvidiaThe graphics processing unit (GPU) is, but it represents one of the real contenders in Nvidia’s almost undisputed AI hardware dominance.
While it is still far from dethroning Nvidia as the king of AI hardware, TPU is seeing rapid adoption.
Anthropic announced late last year that it will spend tens of billions of dollars to bring one gigawatt of computing power to TPUs online by 2026. And OpenAI is also starting to work with Google’s TPUs.
But those aren’t the only businesses relying on Google’s AI technology.
A big apple
At the beginning of this year, an apple it was one of the biggest tech companies that didn’t have its own big proprietary AI program. That changed in mid-January when it was announced that the company would work with Google to address that problem.
Apple will be basing the basic model of its Apple Intelligence AI program on Google’s Gemini model and using Google’s cloud computing services.
The iPhone maker is already working with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into Siri. But now, Siri will be an AI program in its own right — based on the Gemini code as opposed to something of Apple’s design.
Whether Apple will develop its own proprietary system in the future or rely on Google in the long run remains to be seen.
But for now, Google’s AI system will be running natively on one of the most popular smartphones in the world, which controls 25% of the market.
Now, let’s talk about money.
A digital Midas
Even if OpenAI and Anthropic had chosen to challenge Alphabet directly instead of integrating its hardware and working with it, they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Neither company has made a profit yet. Meanwhile, Google is, well, Google.
For the company’s first quarter 2026 results, it reported revenue of $109.8 billion, up 22% year over year. Net income grew 81% over the same period, and earnings per share (EPS) increased 82%.
In addition, Alphabet increased its gross margin from 32.8% at the end of 2025 to 37.9% at the end of the first quarter of 2026.
The company also maintains a very healthy debt-to-equity ratio of 0.19, even with the tens of billions of dollars it and its big tech peers are now spending on data centers and other AI hardware.
Put all this together, and you have a company that has both the market position and the means to completely dominate AI. That’s something to consider, if I do say so myself.
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James Hires has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Apple, Broadcom, Meta Platforms, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a policy of disclosure.
The Best AI Software Stock to Buy in 2026 was originally published by The Motley Fool
