Alphabet Inc Class C

Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance, or AEMA, a coalition that dynamically manages the electricity use of data centers in response to grid conditions. Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram said the alliance's founding members are joined by a cohort of 20 launch partners, including the AI lab Anthropic, the semiconductor firm Analog Devices, and the energy companies AES, NRG, Constellation, RWE and National Grid. Sivaram said Emerald AI, which was founded under two years ago, is building with Nvidia and Digital Realty the world's first from-the-ground-up power-flexible AI data center, a 100 megawatt facility in Manassas, Virginia, that comes online later this year. He said Google, one of the founding members, has already done a gigawatt of demand response for its data centers, while Emerald and Nvidia have completed six demonstrations around the world, in London, Phoenix and Virginia. Sivaram said the alliance is talking to the FERC commissioners, state regulators and the administration about a grand bargain in which flexible AI data centers act as good citizens to grids and communities in return for faster and larger connections to the power grid.

DTE Energy is trading at $131.61 with a BUY rating and a $148.32 price target from 24/7 Wall St., backed by 2.4 gigawatts of signed hyperscaler agreements including a 1.4 GW Oracle deal already under construction and a 1 GW Google agreement in Van Buren Township that could unlock roughly $5 billion of incremental capex through 2032. CEO Joi Harris said on the Q2 call that momentum remains strong across the development pipeline, and management stated that three gigawatts of signed contracts unlocks 8%-plus EPS growth, with another two gigawatts in advanced discussions targeting a deal by year end. Q1 2026 operating EPS of $1.95 missed the $2.03 consensus, dragged by a $25 million Energy Trading loss, though core utility earnings rose on the February rate order, and management reaffirmed 2026 operating EPS guidance of $7.59 to $7.73 with confidence toward the high end. The bear case centers on regulatory scrutiny from back-to-back rate case filings before the Michigan Public Service Commission and a $36.5 billion five-year capex program requiring $500 to $600 million of annual equity issuance through 2028, while the company protects against stranded assets with minimum billing demand of 80% and contracts of 10 years or longer. DTE offers the same data center upside as Constellation Energy but wraps it in a 3.52% dividend yield and regulated-utility stability, and its 2.4 GW of signed contracts is currently more advanced than CMS Energy's disclosed signings.

Alphabet shares climbed in premarket trade after Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney raised his price objective to $450 from $420, citing new data showing Google's search position has rebounded. In Evercore's most recent poll, 78% of respondents said they used Google as their preferred search engine in August, up from a low of 70% in 2024 and early 2025. Mahaney said Google's search leadership has improved over the last year and lifted his expectations for Google's search revenue through 2028, with his sales and operating income estimates for 2028 now 4% to 5% above the Wall Street consensus. Alphabet also benefited from a Sept. 16 court verdict that fell short of requiring Google to divest its ad-tech division, though the company has been ordered to adjust its advertising tactics and allow monitoring for six years. Tigress Financial also increased its price target to $485 from $415.

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway effective immediately at age 96, becoming chairman emeritus while remaining on the board, with Greg Abel now running the company and Howard Buffett becoming chairman. Buffett took control of Berkshire in 1965 and compounded per-share market value at 19.7% annually from 1965 through 2025, versus 10.5% for the S&P 500 with dividends, producing a 6,099,294% cumulative gain against 46,061% for the index. Abel became chief executive in January and has already put Berkshire's cash to work, investing $10 billion in Alphabet's June private placement and accumulating roughly 106 million shares worth $37.8 billion by June 30, making Alphabet Berkshire's third-largest stock holding. Berkshire was a net buyer of stocks in the second quarter, investing $23.5 billion while selling $3.7 billion. Howard Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, becomes chairman as a guardian of the company's culture and values, while Abel retains responsibility for major capital-allocation decisions.

Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company owned by Alphabet, announced on the 18th that it will launch a fully electric autonomous ride-hailing service in Singapore by 2028. This marks the company's first entry into Southeast Asia. An initial fleet of fully electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles will arrive in Singapore within a few months, and in 2027 trained autonomous driving specialists will carry out manual driving in the initial phase to adapt Waymo's autonomous driving system, Waymo Driver, to local road layouts and monsoon weather patterns, with the launch of public service expected in 2028. The company is working with Singapore's Ministry of Transport and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to bring the service to the country, and Transport Minister Chee said, "Singapore welcomes Waymo as the latest autonomous vehicle operator." On the 15th, Waymo also announced plans to launch Japan's first fully autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027.

Google's Rethink ROI summit in New York spotlighted a widening gap between rapid AI-driven shopping discovery and merchant payment systems that cannot yet complete agent-initiated transactions. The platform's new conversational attributes let retailers feed structured data, including FAQ, compatible accessories, and substitutes, directly into the Shopping Graph, and in early testing with Lululemon, brand-supplied attributes were incorporated into AI Mode recommendations 50% of the time. Demand for such tools is backed by Adobe Analytics data showing an 805% year-over-year increase in AI-driven traffic to retail sites during Black Friday 2025, while Salesforce Cyber Week data confirms retailers with integrated AI agents grew sales 32% faster than those without, and Adobe found those shoppers are 38% more likely to convert. That traffic, however, is colliding with a payment readiness deficit: the TLT LLP Retail Agility survey of the top 100 UK retailers found that while 49% are investing in agentic AI, only 15% say their payment systems are prepared for agent-initiated transactions. Google is attempting to standardize the transaction layer through the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Universal Cart framework, which aim to enable persistent, cross-platform shopping carts across Search, YouTube, and Gmail, and with a 10-week horizon to Black Friday 2026, the next two months will determine which brands move from discovery-focused AI to transaction-ready agentic commerce.

Alphabet opened its Google Home smart-home ecosystem to rival AI agents, turning the platform into a broader distribution channel rather than a Gemini-only service. The company's Home MCP server now lets compatible third-party agents such as Claude and OpenClaw inspect connected devices, track their status, execute commands and work with historical household events. The service sits behind Google's Premium Advanced plan, priced at $20 per month or $200 annually, and also requires a Google Cloud project. Google has placed limits around higher-risk actions such as unlocking doors, though opening the system to outside agents introduces a new security variable. Alphabet shares gained approximately 1.5% to $347.91 Thursday, with the stock trading 35.37% above its GF Value estimate of $257.01.

Crux AI, the cloud venture backed by Google and Blackstone, has secured $22 billion in debt financing to buy Google-developed Tensor Processing Units, according to Bloomberg. Ten banks are reportedly providing the financing, including Goldman Sachs, Barclays, BNP Paribas and Bank of Nova Scotia, with the debt backed partly by the value of Google's TPUs and partly by customer contracts signed by Crux AI. Blackstone has separately committed an initial $5 billion in equity. Crux AI plans to bring its first 500 megawatts of data-center capacity online in 2027, a test of whether customers will adopt Google's chips on a much larger scale outside Google's own ecosystem. The $22 billion solves part of the funding problem, and investors will be watching how quickly Crux AI fills that first 500 megawatts.

Allianz Partners and Waymo have formed a collaboration to build insurance, claims and safety research solutions supporting Waymo's service expansion across Europe, with a phased commercial deployment planned starting in Germany and the possibility of extending to additional markets over time. The arrangement pairs Waymo's autonomous driving system, the Waymo Driver, with insurance, mobility assistance and vehicle safety research capabilities from Allianz Partners, Allianz Group's business-to-business-to-consumer insurance and assistance services arm, backed by other Allianz Group entities including the Allianz Center for Technology, Allianz Versicherungs, Allianz Commercial and Solvd Group. The partnership focuses on four priority areas: tailored insurance and risk management for Waymo's autonomous fleets, including motor fleet insurance and general liability multinational insurance programmes for product liability protection plus new insurance models for autonomous mobility platforms; digital claims handling through Solvd Group, Allianz Partners' digital claims management entity, intended to support streamlined end-to-end claims processing in future; joint research on autonomous vehicle safety, claims trends and risk modelling, with the Allianz Center for Technology contributing crash analysis and vehicle safety expertise and potential joint publications as operational data becomes available; and vehicle recovery, where the companies will examine additional areas for collaboration over time, including operational solutions designed for autonomous fleets. Allianz Partners CEO Tomas Kunzmann said Waymo's technology leadership combined with Allianz's global expertise in insurance, assistance and vehicle safety allows the companies to build a comprehensive ecosystem providing passengers peace of mind at every stage of the journey, while Waymo risk and insurance head Tilia Gode said the tie-up pairs Waymo's proven US safety record and commercial experience with world-class European risk and claims expertise. In July, Allianz agreed to buy Singapore life and health insurance business HSBC Life (Singapore) from HSBC Holdings for $2.09bn (S$2.7bn).

Warren Buffett told CNBC that markets are in a gambling mood and that prices for many assets will look very silly, while confirming he initiated Berkshire Hathaway's aggressive buying of Alphabet stock, a position now worth about $38 billion and representing roughly 12.6% of its public equity holdings. Buffett said the decision was made by Greg Abel, and when asked why he was comfortable buying Alphabet over other hyperscalers spending heavily on AI-related capital expenditures, he said he did not want to knock the others because they have no choice, adding that in many cases they are playing a game they do not want to play. Bond markets are pricing in default risk for Oracle, with a mid-market credit default swap spread of 192 basis points implying a 3.2% one-year default probability and 14.8% cumulatively over five years, after S&P Global Ratings downgraded Oracle debt from BBB to BBB-, its lowest investment-grade rating, warning that an industry downturn would hit Oracle worse than other hyperscalers. The takeaway is that any significant market-led weakness tied to weaker hyperscalers could be a buying opportunity in higher-quality names like Alphabet.

Quintrace, esVolta, and LevelTen Energy announced the results of a battery storage pilot, sponsored by Google, that used hourly, time-stamped Granular Certificates to shift surplus renewable energy to hours when Google's energy consumption exceeded its renewable supply. Across the 3-month pilot, the batteries charged and discharged a total of 9.2 GWh during the defined mid-day charging and evening discharging windows, with each hour verified by Quintrace against the EnergyTag standard. esVolta contributed its Anole project, at 240 MW / 480 MWh, and its Burksol project, at 100 MW / 200 MWh, while LevelTen managed the registry accounts to ensure no double-counting and provided the transaction framework for the storage-shift agreements. Under the agreements, Google contracted with the battery operators to time-shift environmental attributes it already owned, without tolling the batteries or assuming any merchant or dispatch risk, leaving operators in full control of their assets. The pilot's backers said the structure opens the first environmental revenue stream for battery assets as the Science Based Targets initiative begins requiring hourly reporting for large energy users and the GHG Protocol evaluates how to address the issue.

Vitality, in partnership with Google, announced the U.S. expansion of Vitality AI, an AI-driven health platform built on Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise that delivers personalized health recommendations, coaching, and incentives to health plans and employers. The platform draws on more than 2,800 unique health and behavioral dimensions and generates personalized insights at a 99.2% accuracy rate based on physicians' review. Vitality said engaged clients experience a 4% reduction in healthcare claims costs on average, a 180% return on investment, and an average recovery of 4.4 productive days per employee per year, equivalent to annual savings of $1,047 per employee. Internationally, members receiving personalized AI-driven recommendations were 3.3 times more likely to complete a mental wellbeing assessment, 2.7 times more likely to complete an online health review, and 1.4 times more likely to complete a colorectal cancer screening, while recommending and incentivizing cancer screenings led to an estimated 23,302 additional screenings in 2025, resulting in 219 early detections and an estimated six deaths prevented. Vitality AI is now live across Vitality and Discovery and in the UK, South Africa, and the United States, and since June 2025 more than 210,000 people in the U.S. have received an AI-driven personalized health action, with 54% completing at least one AI-recommended health action. Emile Stipp, CEO of Vitality AI, said the partnership with Google has shown that AI's impact on health care is a proven differentiator, and Maureen Costello, Vice President, UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa at Google Cloud, said the expansion marks the next step in the partnership with a goal of extending life expectancy and reducing healthcare-associated costs across the U.S.

Alphabet's Google Cloud revenue grew 82% to $24.8 billion in the second quarter, with backlog jumping more than $50 billion sequentially to $514 billion, a figure larger than Alphabet's entire fiscal 2025 revenue base. The company's Q2 2026 results showed EPS of $9.11 against a $3.04 consensus, revenue of $119.8 billion up 24.23% year over year, and operating margin expanding to 34%, while cloud growth accelerated from 48% in Q4 2025 to 63% in Q1 2026 and 82% in Q2 2026. 24/7 Wall St. maintains a buy recommendation on Alphabet with a price target of $504.76, implying 50.47% upside from a current price of $335.45, and a model confidence of 90%. The bull case targets $569.14, citing that nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 use Gemini Enterprise, Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users, and model APIs process 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion a quarter ago. Risks include Q2 capex of $44.9 billion doubling year over year, free cash flow swinging negative to -$5.86 billion, long-term debt roughly doubling from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion, and suspended buybacks, though cloud operating income more than tripled to $8.8 billion with margins climbing to 35.6%.

Tapestry has enabled in-app shopping for Coach and Kate Spade through Google's Gemini app and Google Search. The rollout connects Tapestry's product catalog to Google's AI shopping tools, letting users browse and buy without visiting brand websites. Transactions use Universal Commerce Protocol to support direct, secure checkout for Coach and Kate Spade inside Google's platforms. The company runs global luxury brands across accessories and lifestyle products, so the move plugs its Coach and Kate Spade labels into one of the largest AI-enabled shopping funnels available to US consumer companies. Rivals such as LVMH and Capri Holdings are also pushing harder into AI-driven discovery, leaving open whether Tapestry's brands can convert that traffic into full-price, high-margin demand.

Google has entered into an agreement with Stegra to purchase environmental attribute certificates connected to Stegra's steel production in Boden, Sweden. The agreement covers certificates for a volume of up to 91.000 tonnes of steel in the first year, with an ambition to add more volumes over the length of the agreement. The certificates let Google address steel-related emissions from its own operations, including datacenter construction, while generating increased cash flow for Stegra's early years of operations and production ramp-up. Adam Elman, Director of Sustainability for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said certificates are another vital mechanism alongside physical procurement, following proven models in clean electricity and sustainable aviation fuel. Stegra CEO Henrik Henriksson said the company is grateful Google chose to work with Stegra and support its first years of operations. The arrangement uses a book and claim model that decouples environmental attributes from the physical steel, with buyers of the physical steel obliged to commit to making no green claims to avoid double counting of emission avoidance.

Alphabet-backed robotaxi service Waymo has announced the expansion of its autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas, as well as a 2027 rollout of Waymo vehicles in Tokyo. In an official statement released on Monday, Waymo said it is rolling out its service in Las Vegas, where a majority of the fleet would comprise the Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd.-backed Zeekr's co-developed "Ojai" Robotaxis with Waymo's sixth-generation self-driving suite. Waymo says the service will be offered in an area spanning nearly 24 miles from Boulder Junction to Sahara Avenue and from Spring Valley to Winchester in Las Vegas, with plans to expand to other residents in the Clark County region. In a separate release, Waymo said it will be rolling out its unsupervised Robotaxis in Tokyo next year, contingent on securing regulatory approval from national and local authorities, as well as completing the ongoing validation of Waymo's technology. Waymo has partnered with taxi operator Nihon Kotsu as well as Japanese ride-hailing platform GO, and riders will be able to book rides in Tokyo via the Waymo app as well as the GO app once the service rolls out. Separately, Uber Technologies Inc. said it will expand and offer Robotaxis on its platform in Japan, with CEO Dara Khosrowshahi calling Japan a "terrific market" for the ride-hailing giant; Uber has signed an operational partnership with Japan's Hinomaru Kotsu Co. Ltd. to oversee fleet operations in Tokyo as the service eyes a late 2026 launch.

Alphabet backed its biggest carbon-removal project yet through Terradot, Reuters reported Wednesday, even as its shares slipped approximately 0.9% to $341.72. Terradot plans to deploy enhanced-weathering material across more than 200,000 hectares of rice fields in Brazil, targeting one million metric tons of methane-abatement credits by 2030 and another one million tons of carbon-removal credits by 2040, a removal target roughly ten times the scale of earlier rock-weathering projects. Google already owns an equity stake in Terradot, giving it exposure not just as a buyer of credits but as a financial backer of the technology itself. A 2024 Terradot transaction implied a removal cost of about $300 per ton, while developers see roughly $100 as a level that could unlock much broader adoption, though pricing for Google's latest agreement has not been disclosed. Alphabet's $341.72 share price stands 34.54% above its GF Value estimate of $253.99, putting more pressure on Google's massive AI and infrastructure spending to translate into durable growth.

Nvidia launched the AI Energy Management Alliance with Google and Emerald AI on Wednesday, targeting electricity, one of AI's biggest physical bottlenecks. Nvidia shares gained approximately 0.9% to $214.08. The alliance aims to make data centers behave more like flexible grid assets, shifting computing workloads, tapping stored energy or cutting electricity demand when the grid comes under pressure, and its framework is designed to measure how quickly facilities can respond, how long that flexibility lasts, how predictable it is and how operators behave during emergencies. If utilities and grid operators can trust those commitments, hyperscale projects could face fewer interconnection roadblocks and potentially require less incremental infrastructure before coming online. Power availability is increasingly a constraint on AI infrastructure deployment, and data-center revenue reached $89 billion, roughly 92.5% of Nvidia's latest quarterly sales, so delays in energizing new facilities can eventually become delays in installing Nvidia systems.

Alphabet reported Q2 FY2026 Google Search & other revenue up 17% to $63.27B and Google Cloud revenue up 82% to $24.77B, with YouTube ads climbing 13% to $11.06B. The company posted its 12th straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth and its 11th consecutive EPS beat, with Q2 EPS of $9.11 against a $3.0427 consensus, while FY2025 revenue crossed $400B for the first time on $73.27B of free cash flow. Alphabet guided 2026 CapEx to $175B-$185B, which pushed Q2 free cash flow to negative $5.86B, and long-term debt roughly doubled from $46.5B to $98.2B, with the buyback suspended in Q2 2026. The cloud backlog nearly doubled to over $460 billion in Q1, nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 now use Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini App has 950M monthly active users. Alphabet raised its dividend 5% to $0.22 per share, and Waymo just passed 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week.

SpaceX's AI computing business has flipped to positive adjusted EBITDA, a shift that could help lift the company from its roughly $2 trillion market capitalization toward $3 trillion. The AI segment, the smallest of SpaceX's three businesses in 2025 at about $3.2 billion in revenue, jumped to $3.4 billion in sales by the second quarter of 2026 after SpaceX began renting out spare capacity from its Colossus supercomputer instead of using it solely to train Grok. Starlink remains the only consistently profitable segment at scale, generating $7.5 billion in revenue, or roughly 60% of the company's total, along with $2.8 billion in operating income and $4.7 billion in adjusted EBITDA through June 30, with 12 million subscribers. The space business, which includes Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, generated $1.6 billion in revenue from 78 launches in the first six months of the year but is still losing money at the operating line because Starship development is consuming billions in research and development costs. SpaceX has signed AI capacity deals including Anthropic at $1.25 billion a month for Colossus 1, Google Cloud at $920 million a month starting this fall, and Reflection AI at $150 million a month in a contract worth up to $6.3 billion, while CFO Bret Johnsen said the company is on track to reach a $100 billion annual run rate by the end of this year.

Terradot and Google announced a megaton-scale climate project in Southern Brazil that pairs methane avoidance in rice farming with permanent carbon dioxide removal, marking Google's largest carbon removal purchase to date. Google will purchase 1M tonnes of near-term methane impact by 2030 and 1M tonnes of carbon removal impact by 2040, delivering 1M tonnes of impact by 2030. The project is the largest enhanced rock weathering project ever undertaken and the first of any kind to combine near-term methane elimination with durable carbon removal at this scale. Terradot will help rice farmers across more than 200,000 hectares starting in Rio Grande do Sul adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying, an irrigation practice that periodically drains flooded paddies to cut water use and sharply reduce methane, while spreading naturally sourced crushed volcanic rock on farmland to generate durable carbon removal. Terradot CEO James Kanoff said the project eliminates the trade-off between moving fast on near-term warming and removing carbon permanently, and Google Head of Carbon Removal Randy Spock said the agreement is built to be a template rather than a one-off. As part of the project, Google is providing an R&D grant to Terradot and to Stanford Doerr School's Soil & Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab to strengthen the scientific foundation of AWD as a methane mitigation strategy.

Anthropic agreed to spend $517 billion on computing power over the 11 months through the end of August, according to The Information, far above the $180 billion in commitments it had previously disclosed. The spending is set to benefit Nvidia, whose GPUs remain the primary chips powering AI workloads and which could invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as an anchor investor in its IPO. Advanced Micro Devices will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, which will buy AMD's Helios rack-scale system and deploy up to 2 gigawatts of AMD GPUs beginning in 2027. Anthropic is also set to become Broadcom's largest customer as it deploys Tensor Processing Units that Alphabet co-designed with Broadcom, with Broadcom saying Anthropic will deploy 1 gigawatt of Alphabet's Ironwood TPUs this year, 5 gigawatts of its TPU v8i in 2027 and another 10 gigawatts in 2028. Amazon, which owns around a 20% stake in Anthropic, has received more than $100 billion in AWS cloud commitments from the lab over the next decade.

Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, on September 9, starting at $1,999 with preorders opening October 16 and availability beginning October 23. The device pairs a 5.4-inch outer display with a 7.6-inch folding inner screen and runs on the A20 Pro chip manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor. The launch comes as Apple enters a new era under CEO John Ternus, who took the helm on September 1 as longtime leader Tim Cook stepped down after 15 years as CEO to become executive chairman. Apple's fiscal third-quarter revenue increased 16% year over year to $109.4 billion, with iPhone, Mac, and Services each delivering double-digit growth. Siri AI began rolling out in English-language beta on September 14, underpinned by a multiyear collaboration with Alphabet's Google Gemini technology and a separate OpenAI partnership integrating ChatGPT into Siri and Writing Tools. Apple stock trades around $330 a share, roughly 4% below its 52-week and all-time high, at 38X fiscal 2026 consensus earnings estimates of $8.85 per share and 35X FY27 EPS estimates of $9.53, and currently holds a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

Greg Abel has led Berkshire Hathaway for nearly three full quarters since taking over as CEO from Warren Buffett at the beginning of this year, and the most notable change under his watch is a major bet on Alphabet. Alphabet is now a top-five portfolio position for Berkshire, ranking No. 5, alongside Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America. Alphabet accounts for roughly 10.5% of Berkshire's stock portfolio between class A and class B shares, a level no other tech stock has ever matched or exceeded except Apple, which accounts for roughly 20.8% of the conglomerate's public holdings. Together, the two tech companies now make up roughly 31% of Berkshire's total stock holdings. Operations at Berkshire's fully owned subsidiaries have seen little change, and there have been no game-changing acquisitions or dramatic shifts in the broader public stock portfolio.