We recently published a list of 10 Trending AI Stocks to Watch for the Rest of 2024. Since Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) ranks 6th on the list, it deserves a deeper look.

Chris Hyzy, Merrill & Bank of America Private Bank chief investment officer, said while talking to CNBC in a latest program that there is “ a lot of momentum” behind the market rally. The analyst said that to gauge how much momentum we have behind the optimism, we need to analyze the “wedge” in the market.

“The biggest wedge that was in the market last year and in 2022 was inflation. That’s beginning to go away. It’s almost to the fact that no one’s is talking about whether or not we are going to have inflation that’s worrisome.”

Hyzy said that the Fed easing its fiscal policy and now China “joining the party” will be two key tailwinds for the market.

Answering a question about the hard landing vs soft landing debate, the analyst said we should look beyond the two possibilities as he believes there are many other scenarios to consider in between these two outcomes.

“We have a lot of components of a soft landing. I’d like to say it’s more of a mid-cycle slowdown with easier financial conditions that should actually create a profit revision to the upside not downside,” Hyzy added.

For this article we picked top 10 trending AI stocks on the back of latest news and analyst ratings. With each company we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 165

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares are trending after the company released new AI capabilities. Google Cloud showcased its AI capabilities at the Google Gemini at Work event on Tuesday, highlighting various applications of AI agents in businesses. Analysts from Wedbush, led by Scott Devitt, noted a growing confidence in Google’s generative AI offerings and their potential to drive growth for Google Cloud.

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is collaborating with major players like Snap, Volkswagen, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Best Buy to develop AI agents tailored for different tasks. The main types of AI agents include those for customer support, employee assistance, coding, data management, security, and creative projects.

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) also shared that over 2 million developers are utilizing its GenAI solutions, with a remarkable 36-fold increase in Gemini API usage on Vertex AI since the start of the year.

The key question everyone is asking is whether Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) will be able to maintain its search dominance amid the onslaught of AI search products.

Despite constant alarms going off about its search business, Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) search revenue jumped about 13.7% in the second quarter year over year. As of the end of June, Google has about 91.06% share of the search engine market, just 1.65% lower than the December 2019 levels.  With AI overviews and other search initiatives, Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) will be able to stave off any competitors given its dominance in the market. According to StatCounter report, Bing search engine’s market share only increased from 3.03% in August 2023 to 3.91% in August 2024. This shows MSFT has not been able to make any notable dent in Google’s market share.

Cloud and YouTube are two key strong catalysts for Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares. During the second quarter, Alphabet’s Cloud revenue rose 28.8% to $10.35 billion, crushing past analysts’ forecasts of $10.16 billion. Alphabet Inc Class C (NASDAQ:GOOG)  is on the path to reach a $100 billion revenue run-rate from YouTube Ads and Google Cloud by the end of 2024.

Baron Fifth Avenue Growth Fund stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its Q2 2024 investor letter:

“We also added to Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). The company reported solid financial results with first quarter revenue growth of 15% year-over-year, driven by 14% growth in search, 21% growth in YouTube, and 28% growth in cloud (which accelerated from 26% growth in the fourth quarter). The company has also increased its cost discipline efforts, which drove operating margins to 31.6% (compared to 25% in the first quarter of 2023). With regards to GenAI, while we are cognizant of the potential risks to the dominance of search, we believe that on the range of outcomes, Alphabet remains well positioned through its massive user distribution (9 products with over 1 billion users each), long-standing AI research labs (DeepMind and Google Brain), top AI talent, a solid cloud computing division in Google Cloud, and deep pockets for investing in AI. During the quarter, Alphabet also held its annual I/O conference, where it provided an update on its efforts in AI including: Gemini is now used by 1.5 million developers; model quality is expanding rapidly (e.g., context window is now 2 million tokens of length); the new genomics model, Alphafold 3 can predict structures of molecules and potentially accelerate drug discovery; new TPU6 AI chips has shown a 4.7 times improvement in compute performance compared to the prior generation; and Gemini for workspace is showing early data on a 30% increase in user productivity. Alphabet also has real value in assets such as Waymo, which are not factored into valuation today (and are potentially included at a negative valuation as they currently generate losses, hurting EPS). We continue to believe that the current valuation of Alphabet presents an attractive risk/reward for long-term owners of the business and have therefore increased our position.”

Overall, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) ranks 6th on Insider Monkey’s list titled 10 Trending AI Stocks to Watch for the Rest of 2024. While we acknowledge the potential of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than GOOG but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.