Alphabet posts strongest Wall Street year since 2009 as AI gains drive rally

Alphabet closed out 2025 with its best performance on Wall Street since 2009, with shares up about 65% for the year. The stock hit a low in April amid trade-tariff worries, then climbed more than 100% from that trough and was the biggest gainer among the eight tech companies valued at over $1 trillion.

Chipmakers Broadcom and Nvidia were the next-largest rallies, rising roughly 49% and 39%, respectively. Investors' optimism has centered on Google's AI progress after skepticism early in the year about whether the company could maintain search dominance in an AI era. Google promoted long-time executive Josh Woodward to run the Gemini app, and the company launched Gemini features such as the viral image generator Nano Banana, which helped the app surpass 5 billion generated images and reach the top of Apple's App Store.

Google also hired senior engineers from AI coding startup Windsurf, agreeing to pay $2.4 billion in licensing fees and compensation to bring talent on board. A U.S. judge limited the remedies in Google’s antitrust case, ruling the company would not have to divest Chrome and could continue making preload payments, though it must share certain data with competitors.

Google released an upgraded model, Gemini 3, and usage trends showed Gemini gaining market share: Similarweb data cited ChatGPT’s share of generative AI traffic falling to about 68% from 87% year over year, while Gemini rose to roughly 18% from about 5%.

Key Topics

AI, Tech, Alphabet, Google, Stocks, Wall Street