Cantor Fitzgerald upgraded its rating on Alphabet stock. Will Gemini beat ChatGPT?

Analyst company Cantor Fitzgerald raised its rating on Alphabet shares from "neutral" to "above market", increasing the target price for the company's securities from $310 to $370, Barrons reports. Such an assessment implies growth of Alphabet's shares by almost 15% relative to the closing level on January 7.

At the beginning of trading on January 8, Alphabet's securities added a little more than 1%. The day before, Alphabet overtook Apple in market capitalization for the first time since 2019, rising to the second line of the list of the most expensive public companies (only Nvidia is more expensive for investors).

"After a solid outperformance last year, [Alphabet] shares are now trading above mid-range and expectations for them in the short term are high," said Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Deepak Mathivanan in a note issued on Wednesday, January 7. - However, we expect premium valuations to hold, while [the company's] revenue growth will accelerate" (quoted in Barrons).

Alphabet's securities soared 65% in 2025, while the broad S&P 500 index of U.S. stocks added just over 16% over the same period. So highly investors appreciated the improvements of Alphabet chatbot model Gemini, as well as other AI capabilities of the company, notes CNBC. They will also be the drivers of Alphabet's growth in the future, according to Cantor Fitzgerald. Mativanan also sees the prospect of further growth in the company's revenues in Alphabet's cloud business and in the field of search, including through the integration of AI solutions, writes CNBC.

While the initial launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022 put the company at the forefront of the artificial intelligence race, the AI market has begun to change in recent months, Barrons notes. Alphabet's launch of the Nano Banana image generation tool in August 2025, followed by the Gemini 3 in November, has led to an increase in the number of users of Google's technology. And while ChatGPT still has the edge in user numbers right now - Cantor estimates it has about 900 million active users per week versus Gemini's 650 million monthly active users - the gap between the two AI platforms appears to be shrinking, Barrons writes.

According to data from Similarweb, Gemini's market share has grown from less than 6% to more than 20% in the past 12 months, while ChatGPT's share has fallen from around 85% to less than 65% over the same period, the publication points out, emphasizing that Cantor analysts believe this gap will only accelerate going forward."While we see opportunities for the two AI assistants to coexist [in the market] long-term, we believe the defining competitive advantage is likely to be 'practical utility' rather than 'intelligent patterns,' where Google has a significant advantage given the company's decade-long investment in improving and commercializing search," Ma noted (quoted by Barrons).

His $370 target price for Alphabet shares, the analyst explained, is based on a price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 30, based on his forecast for the company's combined earnings for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.

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