The highly influential manager of Coatue Management, Philippe Laffont also made a bold asset reallocation decision in which he was divested of 14% of its stake in Nvidia (equivalent to 1.6 million shares) but simultaneously invested 259% more into Alphabet (5.2 million shares) in the third quarter.
This inhibition may be subject to discussion in terms of strategic justification of the reason to replace one of the market leaders providing semiconductors based on artificial intelligence (AI) with the Google parent company in the time of significant market growth.
Long term tracking of Nvidia’s Term
Nvidia has been closely followed by the Coatue Management, but at the time when Nvidia increased its market capitalization to about $4.3 trillion, a profit exercise became acute.
Coatue continues to hold Nvidia as its eighth-largest’ largest stake, worth the $2.5 b+, alongside the hold in Meta, Microsoft, TSMC, Amazon, and Broadcom.
Alphabet’s Resilient Growth Amid AI Hype
The direction that Alphabet follows is more than a response to more hype-based development that Nvidia has been experiencing.
In spite of initial doomsday scenarios since the launch of ChatGPT, Alphabet has managed to drive growth: Gemini has been incorporated to improve Google Search and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) itself has grown, the CapEx was $24 billion in the third quarter, primarily invested in technical infrastructure, with approximately 60% in servers and 40% in data centers and networking equipment.
Returned capital to shareholders through stock repurchases of $11.5 billion and dividend payments of $2.5 billion, as announced in the earnings issue, which enabled it to get major deals with Meta and OpenAI.
The deployment of GCP with Tensor processing unit (TPUs) by Anthropic poses a threat to the hegemony of graphics cards to Nvidia, whereas the presence of Waymo cars continues to run operations in the cities of the U.S.
The current forward price-to-earnings ratio of Alphabet is 27.17, which makes it the cheapest among hyperscalers as compared to that of Microsoft, which is 34.37, according to YCharts.
Future Outlook
The strategic hedge should not be taken out as abandonment but seen as a maneuver aimed at hedging.
Google’s integrated AI agent tech stack (spanning advanced reasoning models, protocols and infrastructure), scalable enterprise adoption support, and use of Google Deepmind to invest in key AI disruptors make it the Company to Beat in enterprise agentic AI because it outpaces competition in vision and innovation.
With Nvidia likely to keep its short and term dominance, Laffont reallocation could indicate a shift in the long term, which would lead to Alphabet as a latent leader in the AI sphere.
