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[PREDICTION 2026] Does Google or OpenAI increase in value more this year?
The nervous Nellies in the investor community sold tech stocks again on Thursday, dragging down the Nasdaq 0.4%. Sounds like a normal day in February 2026, you might say. But it’s striking how anxieties about the disruption caused by AI continue to weigh on stock prices, including those of leading AI firms like Google, even as private AI leaders are raising new money at ever-higher valuations. If investors are liking OpenAI at a valuation of $830 billion, that should in theory be good for Google stock as well.
Google shares have outperformed those of other big tech names lately, to be sure, but even it is down 3% so far this year. And Google looks cheap compared with OpenAI. At $830 billion, the ChatGPT creator is valued at 14 times its projected 2027 revenue. Google, meanwhile, is trading at 6.7 times estimated 2027 revenue, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. I can hear the objections to that comparison: Google is a mature company, while OpenAI is still building its business. In other words, OpenAI deserves a higher multiple because its revenue is more likely to skyrocket in future years. That’s a perfectly fair point, except for a couple of things.
One, OpenAI loses a lot of money and expects to continue doing so for years. Whether it can ever turn profitable is a real question. Oh, and Google has pretty much everything OpenAI has in AI—except for the constant management drama—plus a bunch more money-making businesses. Who would you rather bet on?
What’s getting lost in this rush to exit tech stocks is that some of these companies are going to come out of the AI transition even more powerful and rich. Google, it seems obvious, will be in that category. Microsoft, a 27% shareholder in OpenAI that is a major cloud provider and was early in selling AI-powered software, may very well be another one. So may Amazon, the leading cloud provider. Investors are very unsure about both Amazon and Microsoft based on their stock performances over the past year. But this is the time for those investors to think independently.
