Google Is One of the Best Investors Nobody Talks About
This image is used under our Editorial Policy.
Everyone knows Google as a search engine. Most people who follow markets know it as an advertising business. The more informed crowd knows it as a cloud computing company growing at a serious clip. But here's what barely anyone talks about: Alphabet — Google's parent company — is quietly one of the most successful venture investors on the planet. And the numbers, when you actually lay them out, are genuinely hard to believe.
Let's start with the three big ones.
The SpaceX Bet That Turned $900 Million Into Over $100 Billion
Back in 2015, Alphabet made a $900 million investment in SpaceX when the company was valued at a mere $12 billion, giving Google's parent company an approximate 7.5% stake.
At the time, it looked like a bold but uncertain bet on a rocket company that hadn't yet proven reusability at scale. Fast forward to June 2026, and SpaceX just completed the largest IPO in U.S. history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. Alphabet holds a 6.11% stake in SpaceX, now worth somewhere between $100 and $122 billion at IPO pricing.
That's a single investment that has multiplied well over a hundredfold. In dollar terms, a $900 million check written eleven years ago is now worth more than most Fortune 500 companies.
The Anthropic Position — And Why It Keeps Getting Bigger
Alphabet's bet on Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude assistant, has followed a similarly aggressive trajectory — except in this case, Google didn't just invest once and walk away. It kept going back.
Bloomberg reported a major new investment into Anthropic from Alphabet, adding another $40 billion to the total, with Anthropic's annualized revenue going from $1 billion at the end of 2024 to $9 billion at the end of 2025, to $30 billion as of early April 2026.
Anthropic was recently valued at $965 billion in a private funding round and could be valued above $1 trillion in the public markets. Alphabet holds a 14% stake in Anthropic, with up to $43 billion committed — capped by agreement at 15%.
The math on this one is still evolving, but at a near-trillion dollar valuation, Alphabet's 14% position is worth somewhere north of $130 billion — on a company that barely existed a few years ago.
Two Bets. One Staggering Number.
Add it up and the picture becomes almost absurd. SpaceX is worth over $100 billion to Alphabet. Anthropic north of $130 billion. Two bets, most of which were made before anyone else saw what was coming, now collectively worth somewhere in the range of $230 billion or more.
That's before you count the hundreds of smaller positions Alphabet holds through its venture arm, Google Ventures — stakes in companies across biotech, AI, fintech, and robotics that rarely make headlines but quietly add up.
The SEC filings tell an interesting story too. In Q1 2026 alone, Alphabet reported other income reflecting a net gain of $37.7 billion, primarily the result of net unrealized gains on non-marketable equity securities. That's a single quarter. The private investment portfolio isn't a side project — it's moving numbers at a scale that most standalone investment firms never reach.
Beyond SpaceX and Anthropic, Alphabet's publicly disclosed investment portfolio tells its own story. According to the company's latest 13F filing as of March 2026, the portfolio spans 26 positions worth over $4 billion. CME Group leads the allocation at 25.6%, followed closely by Planet Labs at 24.5% and AST SpaceMobile at 18.5%. The rest of the portfolio spreads across names like Arm Holdings, Revolution Medicines, UiPath, Tempus AI and Freshworks — a mix of AI infrastructure, biotech and enterprise software that reflects how deliberately Alphabet thinks about where technology is heading. Most investors never look past the search bar. The 13F filings paint a very different picture.
The Core Business Isn't Standing Still Either
Here's the thing that makes Alphabet genuinely unusual: the investment portfolio is almost a bonus on top of a core business that's accelerating in its own right.
In Q1 2026, Alphabet reported revenues of $109.9 billion, up 22% year-over-year — the company's 11th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Google Cloud revenues grew 63% to $20 billion, and operating income surged 30% with operating margins expanding to 36.1%.
Most companies would kill for one of those numbers. Alphabet posted all of them in the same quarter. Google Cloud's revenue backlog stands at $462 billion — which nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026 — representing approximately four years of forward Cloud revenue visibility at current growth rates. The Undervaluation Argument Alphabet's current market cap at approximately $166 per share is approximately $2.0 trillion, suggesting a 35% discount to a conservative sum-of-parts valuation.
That's the crux of what a growing number of analysts are pointing out. When you add up Search, YouTube, Google Cloud, Gemini, Waymo, SpaceX, and Anthropic separately and try to assign a fair value to each piece, the total comes out meaningfully higher than what the stock currently trades at. The market is essentially getting several of those assets for free.
Alphabet is still one of the best ways to invest in AI. It has a rock-solid base business, a booming cloud computing segment, and several other bets that can pay off even if some of its AI endeavors fail.
Most investors look at Google and see a search company. What's actually there is something considerably more interesting — a business that has quietly compounded some of the most consequential investment bets of the last decade while running one of the most profitable core businesses in corporate history.
The content on this page is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Please read our Disclaimer for additional information.
