Berkshire raised its Alphabet stake 658% last quarter, and 24/7 Wall St. rates GOOG a BUY with a $445 price target. Alphabet trades at 17x trailing P/E versus Microsoft's 28x and Meta's 22x, making GOOG the cheapest mega-cap AI name by valuation. Google Cloud's $514 billion backlog and 82% revenue growth support a $511 bull case, while massive 2026 capex remains the key risk.
The most widely read finance newsletter on Substack isn't published by a bank, it's Doomberg, where 383,000+ readers get the energy and macro analysis the mainstream press misses. 24/7 Wall St. readers save 17% on their first year here. Berkshire Hathaway's blockbuster increase in its Alphabet position has turned investor attention to the search giant. The stock has cooled from summer highs even as Google Cloud accelerates and Gemini adoption explodes.
Our 24/7 Wall St. price target for Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) is $445.49, implying 29.68% upside from Friday's close of $343.54. Our recommendation is buy, with a 90% confidence level. Alphabet is up 69.03% over the past year and 9.62% year to date, but shares have pulled back 7.2% in the past month, sitting roughly 4% off the 52-week high of $404.23.
The Q2 2026 report on July 22 showed strong results: revenue of $119.80 billion grew 24.2% YoY, EPS of $9.11 beat the $3.04 consensus, and Google Cloud accelerated to 82% growth. Investors focused instead on capex nearly doubling to $44.92 billion and free cash flow turning negative. Warren Buffett's Berkshire disclosed a dramatically expanded position shortly after, reframing the pullback as an opportunity.
Bulls point to Google Cloud's $514 billion backlog, up more than $50 billion sequentially, with nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 using Gemini Enterprise. Gemini processes 22 billion API tokens per minute, and the Gemini App has 950 million monthly active users. Before Doomberg published a word, its team spent long careers in heavy industry, private equity, and the hard sciences.
They take no advertisers and serve no institution — which is why their lateral-thinking coverage of energy, finance, and geopolitics reads nothing like consensus financial media. Doomberg has set aside a discounted rate exclusively for 24/7 Wall St. readers — it isn't available on their main page. Cloud operating margin expanded to 35.6% from 20.7%, tripling operating income.
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