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Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025. Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images
From the courtroom to the boardroom, it was a big week for tech investors. The resolution of Google's antitrust case led to sharp rallies for Alphabet and Apple . Broadcom shareholders cheered a new $10 billion customer. And Tesla's stock was buoyed by a freshly proposed pay package for CEO Elon Musk. Add it up, and the U.S. tech industry's eight trillion-dollar companies gained a combined $420 billion in market cap this week, lifting their total value to $21 trillion, despite a slide in Nvidia shares. Those companies now account for roughly 36% of the S&P 500, a proportion so great by historical standards that Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, told CNBC by email, "there are no comparisons."
There was a certain irony to this week's gains. Alphabet's 9% jump on Wednesday was directly tied to the U.S. government effort to diminish the search giant's market control, which was part of a years-long campaign to break up Big Tech. Since 2020, Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been hit with antitrust allegations by the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission. A year ago, Google lost to the DOJ, a result viewed by many as the most-significant antitrust decision for the tech industry since the case against Microsoft more than two decades earlier. But in the remedies ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said Google won't be forced to sell its Chrome browser despite its loss in court and instead handed down a more limited punishment, including a requirement to share search data with competitors. The decision lifted Apple along with Alphabet, because the companies can stick with an arrangement that involves Google paying Apple billions of dollars per year to be the default search engine on iPhones. Alphabet rose more than 10% for the week and Apple added 3.2%, helping boost the Nasdaq 1.1%. Analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after the decision that the ruling "removed a huge overhang" on Google's stock and a "black cloud worry" that hung over Apple. Further, they said it clears the path for the companies to pursue a bigger artificial intelligence deal involving Gemini, Google's AI models. "This now lays the groundwork for Apple to continue its deal and ultimately likely double down on more AI related partnerships with Google Gemini down the road," the analysts wrote. Mehta explained that a major factor in his decision was the emergence of generative AI, which has become a much more competitive market than traditional search and has dramatically changed the market dynamics. New players like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity have altered Google's dominance, Mehta said, noting that generative AI technologies "may yet prove to be game changers." On Friday, Alphabet investors shrugged off a separate antitrust matter out of Europe. The company was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) fine from European Union regulators for anti-competitive practices in its advertising technology business.
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