Tech Giant Crown Changes Hands: Alphabet Surpasses Apple in Market Cap

In February 2016, Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company, briefly surpassed Apple in market capitalization on the New York stock exchange, becoming the world's most valuable company for the first time. This shift in power reflected a change in how investment firms viewed growth points in the future industry: the market began placing greater value on Alphabet's strong position in core search and cloud services (a rival to AWS), and its long-term investments in Future World "Other Bets," such as autonomous driving (Waymo), AI (DeepMind), and life sciences (Verily). This event signaled investors' recognition of cloud computing and artificial intelligence as core drivers of the next wave of technological growth.