Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office just made a notable portfolio change. Known for making concentrated bets and rotating quickly when its convictions change, the firm added a new position in Alphabet (GOOGL) to its portfolio.
This is a small move in dollar terms compared to some of Wall Street's biggest funds, but it lands at an interesting moment for the search and cloud giant. Alphabet just wrapped up a quarter that was hard to ignore, even by its own standards. Let's take a closer look.
More Top Stocks Daily: Go behind Wall Street’s hottest headlines with Barchart’s Active Investor newsletter.
www.barchart.com Alphabet's AI Bet Is Paying Off
Alphabet has spent the past few years pouring money into artificial intelligence (AI), from its Gemini models to the custom TPU chips that power its cloud business. The spending has drawn plenty of skepticism from investors who remain worried about payback periods.
The second quarter of 2026 pushed back on that skepticism in a big way. Alphabet reported consolidated revenue of $119.8 billion, up 24% from a year earlier, marking its 12th-straight quarter of double-digit growth. Operating income climbed 30% to $40.8 billion, while operating margin came in at 34%. Cloud revenue jumped 82% to $24.8 billion, and cloud operating income more than tripled, pushing margin up to 35.6% from 20.7% a year earlier.
CEO Sundar Pichai told investors on the Q2 earnings call that Google Cloud's backlog grew to $514 billion, up more than $50 billion in just one quarter, and that the company is still supply constrained even after ramping up capacity.
Search also held up better than many expected. Search and Other revenue rose 17% to $63.3 billion, with retail and finance driving the biggest gains.
Pichai pointed to the newly combined AI Overviews and AI Mode experience, which has already crossed 1 billion monthly active users, as a key driver.
Alphabet is not slowing down on spending, either. CFO Anat Ashkenazi raised the company's full-year capital expenditures guidance to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion, up from the prior estimate of $180 billion to $190 billion, citing faster delivery of AI infrastructure to meet demand.
Duquesne Is Bullish on AI Stocks
According to a recent 13F filing, Duquesne Family Office bought 336,300 shares of Alphabet during the quarter, a position worth about $120.2 million as of the filing date.
The Alphabet stake accounts for 2.3% of Duquesne's reported portfolio as of June 29, 2026, based on the 13F data. The fund’s top holding is Natera (NTRA), which accounts for 16.6% of the portfolio, followed by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) at 5.4%, and STMicroelectronics (STM) at 4.5%.
The Alphabet purchase was not an isolated bet. Notably, the 13F filing shows Duquesne opening several other brand new positions tied to the AI buildout.
The fund initiated fresh positions in Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a major supplier of AI chips, and Palo Alto Networks (PANW), a cybersecurity company increasingly selling AI-driven threat detection tools. It also opened new positions in CDW (CDW), Fluor (FLR), and D.R. Horton (DHI).
Duquesne added new stakes in Bitdeer Technologies (BTDR) and Hut 8 (HUT) as well, two companies exposed to crypto mining and the data-center capacity that AI companies are racing to secure.
Existing positions in Amazon (AMZN) and United Airlines (UAL) also grew sharply, though those were additions to positions the fund already held rather than brand-new stakes.
Taken together, the filing paints a picture of a fund spreading bets across multiple layers of the AI trade rather than concentrating in a single mega-cap name. Chips, cloud infrastructure, storage, cybersecurity, and data center-adjacent plays like Bitdeer and Hut 8 all showed up as new additions in the same quarter.
The portfolio breadth looks more like a firm positioning across the picks and shovels of the AI buildout, with Alphabet's search, cloud and Gemini business serving as one piece of a much wider bet on where AI spending goes next.
Is GOOGL Stock Still Undervalued?
Valued at a market capitalization of $4.16 trillion, Alphabet stock has returned more than 760% over the last 10 years.
Overall, Alphabet has a consensus “Strong Buy” rating on Wall Street. Out of the 54 analysts covering GOOGL stock, 47 recommend a “Strong Buy” rating, three recommend a “Moderate Buy” rating, and four recommend a “Hold.” The average price target of $431.29 represents potential upside of 25% from current levels.
www.barchart.com On the date of publication, Aditya Raghunath did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
More news from Barchart
Duquesne Management Opens New Position in Alphabet Stock as Google Posts Blowout Q2 Results Nike Is Back at Its 2014 Price and Still Isn’t Cheap, and Wall Street Expects Earnings to Fall Another 18% Micron Technology Puts Have High Yields for Short Sellers Even With MU Stock Higher Google Lost About $186 Billion After 4 of Its Top AI Researchers Left, but Sundar Pichai Says Google Will Be ‘A Founding Investor’ Anyway