Just a few years ago, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was a quiet punchline in Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) portfolio: A cash-burning experiment that most investors overlooked while Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure dominated cloud computing budgets.
Then artificial intelligence (AI) changed the narrative entirely
What was once an also-ran became one of Alphabet’s fastest-growing, most profitable divisions. At the end of the first quarter, GCP boasted a backlog of more than $460 billion. This is more than just a headline number.
It is validation that large enterprises and leading AI developers are voting with their wallets — signaling a shift in cloud market dynamics that makes Alphabet stock a standout long-term opportunity even after its recent run. Google Cloud’s turnaround Despite infusions of meaningful capital into cloud infrastructure, GCP consistently posted mundane revenue figures and piled up operating losses while competitors generated double-digit growth and healthy margins. Indeed, enterprise customers were slow to migrate to GCP as they were drawn to AWS’s maturity or Azure’s integration with ChatGPT.