The Zhitong Finance App learned that on Friday, the market value of Alphabet (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US) broke through the $2 trillion mark for the first time due to financial results that exceeded expectations and a new capital allocation plan welcomed by the market. The company announced quarterly dividends of 20 cents per share and a $70 billion share repurchase plan.

On the last trading day of this week, Alphabet's stock price surged nearly 10%, bringing its market capitalization to $2.15 trillion, second only to Nvidia (NVDA.US)'s $2.19 trillion. On Friday alone, Alphabet's market capitalization increased by 195.93 billion US dollars, making it the third-largest single-day market capitalization increase in history.

Alphabet became the fourth company in history to reach a market capitalization of $2 trillion; the other three are Apple (AAPL.US), Microsoft (MSFT.US), and Nvidia.

The company's March quarterly revenue was US$80.5 billion and profit per share was US$1.89, which was higher than market expectations of US$78.7 billion and US$1.51 per share. Among them, “Google Search and others” advertising revenue reached 46.2 billion US dollars, higher than the forecast of 45 billion US dollars. YouTube also surpassed expectations. Revenue from Google Cloud Services was $9.6 billion, up 28% year over year, exceeding expectations of $9.4 billion due to continued expansion in demand for artificial intelligence-related computing.

Alphabet CEO Pichai said in a statement: “The first quarter results reflect strong performance in the search, YouTube and cloud businesses. Our leadership in AI research and infrastructure, as well as our global product footprint, provides us with a solid foundation for the next wave of AI innovation.”

Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai notes that strong revenue from search and YouTube indicates that “the uncertainty of monetizing conversational search and the measurement challenges of branded media have yet to affect Alphabet's bottom line.”

Other people on Wall Street agreed.

“Rumors about Alphabet's decline have been greatly exaggerated,” Wade Bush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a report. He emphasized the accelerated growth of cloud computing and the greater contribution of artificial intelligence. “We believe that the results of the first quarter further validated Google's position as a leading beneficiary of artificial intelligence, and management comments directly addressed the structural risks of generative AI to the search business.” Ives maintains its stock's “outperforming the market” rating and a target price of $205.