TD Cowen raised the price target on Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock to $270 from $240 while maintaining its Buy rating on the shares following the firm’s GenAl Public Cloud Survey.
Analysts led by John Blackledge said Google Cloud Platform, or GCP, had a solid showing in their annual survey, but a gap remains between GCP and market leaders Amazon’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services, or AWS, and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Azure.
In terms of overall awareness, GCP remained in third place in this year’s survey with awareness of 80%, compared to 94% overall awareness for AWS and 93% for Azure. GCP awareness was strongest in the Enterprise group, with 88% of respondents, compared to 70% to 80% for all other business groups, the analysts added.
The analysts noted that GCP ranked second as the potential choice for respondents adding another cloud provider. About 44% of respondents noted they plan to add GCP (second place behind Azure and versus 37% in last year’s survey), while 38% said they expect to replace an existing provider with GCP (versus 36% last year), the third choice (72% would replace with Azure and 67% would replace with AWS).
In addition, Blackledge and his team said that Google’s Gemini was the second most popular generative Al large language model, or LLM, provider.
“We asked respondents which companies provide underlying LLMs for their GenAl tools, and Google was the 2nd most commonly-used provider (54% of respondents, rising from 50% in our 2024 survey). Meanwhile, OpenAl was the top choice (73% of respondents), but declined somewhat vs 82% in our prior year’s survey, perhaps indicating a shift towards a wider array of LLM providers,” said the analysts.
The analysts added that Anthropic, which was not in their survey last year, was the third ranked choice (35% of companies), followed by Meta Platforms (META) in the fourth place (24% of companies using Llama).