Google surpasses Microsoft in market cap

Alphabet’s Google surpassed Microsoft to become the third-largest US company by market value, trailing Nvidia and Apple. It was the first time it beat Bill Gates’s company in seven years.

The company’s shares recently rose 3.5% to reach a market cap of $3.62 trillion, while Microsoft slipped 1.3% to $3.51 trillion.

The stock jump came days after Google released its Gemini 3 AI chatbot and a new version of its image-generation tool, Nano Banana Pro.

Gemini 3 has surged ahead of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to become the top-performing AI chatbot based on industry benchmark tests.

It outperformed competing models on 19 of 20 tests, beating rivals in logic, math, and image understanding. It only lost one benchmark, a coding test, to Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5.

Though ChatGPT remains the most popular chatbot with 800 million weekly users versus Gemini’s 650 million monthly users, analysts say Gemini 3’s performance could shift user preference. The model is already powering AI Mode in Google Search.

Alphabet’s stock is up 50% this year and 60% since the summer, while Microsoft’s stock is up 11% so far in 2025.

Google’s parent’s core businesses are also booming. Cloud revenue was up 32% last quarter, and search revenue is up 15% year over year.

Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo is also doing well. It now operates in five cities, with plans to expand into 12 more, and recently received regulatory approval to operate across the Bay Area and Southern California.