Google I/O primer: Alphabet's AI showcase is its chance to wow Wall Street

An Android character is displayed in front of a building on the Google headquarters campus on July 23, 2025 in Mountain View, California. Justin Sullivan | Alphabet 's stock is up 140% over the past year, with a cloud business that is growing faster than Amazon's and Microsoft's . But 18 months ago, the Google parent looked like it had spent a decade preparing for the artificial intelligence era, only to watch OpenAI define the market. Now, Wall Street is valuing Alphabet like one of the few companies positioned to profit from every layer of the generative AI boom. Google I/O, which begins Tuesday, has always been its venue for showing developers where the company is headed. This year, the stakes are higher. Wall Street has already rewarded Alphabet for its AI comeback, but investors want to see whether that confidence is backed by a real product roadmap across key areas like search, cloud, Android, chips and enterprise software. "Google is probably the best-positioned company to monetize AI at scale because it controls almost every layer of the stack," said Lo Toney, founding managing partner of Plexo Capital and an early investor in Anthropic. "We've never really seen a company that has that complete vertical integration from top to bottom to be able to support AI." Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, said the advantage in having that many layers of control is not just scale, but speed. …