Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares climbed about 8.5% on Monday toward a fresh 52-week high, as the tech giant secured a major NATO cloud and AI contract and rode a wave of bullish investor sentiment.
Google Cloud signed a multi-million-dollar deal with NATO’s Communications and Information Agency to equip the Joint Analysis, Training and Education Centre with its Distributed Cloud technology. The system is designed to support AI and analytics on sensitive workloads, ensuring that data remains within NATO territory.
The announcement adds to a series of positive developments for Alphabet, including strong quarterly earnings, Berkshire Hathaway’s recent stake in the company, and momentum in its artificial intelligence initiatives.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also weighed in on Sunday, praising Alphabet’s latest AI model, Gemini 3, saying he was “not going back” to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Gemini 3, Alphabet’s newest AI model, is embedded in several profit-generating products, including Google Search, and is designed to compete with Microsoft’s 365 Copilot. Notably, it is available in the search engine immediately, a departure from previous releases that took weeks or months to integrate.
Executives highlighted Gemini 3’s strong performance on several leading industry benchmarks. “We think Gemini has set quite a new pace in terms of both releasing the models, but also getting it to people faster than ever before,” said Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google’s chief AI architect, while CEO Sundar Pichai called it “our most intelligent model” in a company blog post.
The progress has raised concerns at OpenAI. CEO Sam Altman, in an internal memo, acknowledged that Google’s advances could create “temporary economic headwinds,” while also noting that competitors such as Google and Anthropic are narrowing the AI lead.
Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, said the rally in Alphabet shares may signal a turning point for tech stocks. “Last week’s flush on Thursday may well have heralded the last hurrah of the selling for the time being, especially as tech traders appear to be piling into Alphabet as the newly-anointed AI winner,” he said.
Wedbush analysts noted that for AI hardware providers, Google’s leadership in AI models is less critical than the broader expansion of revenue-generating AI applications, which underpin investments in AI infrastructure. “Continued advancement and increased use of inference applications support the investments in AI infrastructure,” the firm said.