Alphabetvs.Microsoft
GOOGL vs MSFT · both in Cloud platforms, part of the AI & digital infrastructure value chain: Rents out the compute, the 'power grid' of the AI era.
Alphabet and Microsoft are similar in size by market cap; Alphabet trades at the lower P/E (17.3 vs 27.7); year to date, Alphabet leads (+11.2% vs +0.8%).
Side by side
| GOOGL | MSFT | |
|---|---|---|
| Market cap | $4.2T | $3.7T |
| Price | $346.96 | $491.71 |
| Today | −0.3% | +0.9% |
| Return YTD | +11.2% | +0.8% |
| Return 1Y | +68.9% | −3.9% |
| P/E | 17.3 | 27.7 |
| P/S | 9.5 | 11.1 |
| P/B | 6.6 | 8.4 |
Data as of 2026-08-26 · updates daily after U.S. close
The two companies
AlphabetGOOGL
Few companies own the whole stack. Alphabet runs its own cloud, designs its own TPUs, trains its own frontier model in Gemini, then puts the result in front of users through Search, YouTube and Android.
Full GOOGL profile →MicrosoftMSFT
No software company is bigger, and few have as many places to put AI: Azure rents the infrastructure, Copilot sells the assistant inside Microsoft 365 and GitHub, Maia is a chip of Microsoft's own, and the OpenAI partnership sits underneath much of it.
Full MSFT profile →More GOOGL & MSFT comparisons
Other head-to-heads in the Cloud platforms segment.