Is Google Parent Alphabet Still a Millionaire-Maker Stock?

Key Points

• Alphabet's success so far has been paved largely by Google Search and Google Cloud.

• The company has several new markets to conquer, including AI, robotaxis, and quantum computing.

• Whether or not Alphabet is a millionaire-maker stock, it's poised to be a huge winner over the coming years.

• These 10 stocks could mint the next wave of millionaires ›

Imagine it's the week of Aug. 19, 2004. Swimmer Michael Phelps won the 200- and 400-meter individual medley double at the Olympic Games in Athens. Terror Squad's "Lean Back" topped the U.S. music charts. And a young company named Google, which would later create a parent company named Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL), conducted its initial public offering (IPO).

If you had invested $10,200 on the day Google first traded publicly and never sold a share, your investment would have grown to roughly $1 million today. But is Google parent Alphabet still a millionaire-maker stock?

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Image source: Getty Images.

The path to the first $1 million

Before we attempt to answer that question, let's look at Google's path to the first $1 million. It started in 1996 with two Stanford University graduate students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, developing a search engine for the still-new World Wide Web. They founded Google in 1998. Their search engine quickly became wildly popular.

By the time Google went public in 2004, it dominated internet search. That allowed the company to generate fast-growing advertising revenue. Advertising still accounts for nearly three-quarters of Alphabet's total revenue.

Along the way, Google developed or acquired other products that became huge successes, including the Android mobile operating system, the Chrome browser, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube. It also acquired DoubleClick in 2007, a deal that enabled the company to make money from ads run on other websites.

Google Cloud launched in 2008, just two years after Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) introduced its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. Today, Google Cloud is the fastest-growing major cloud services provider and generates 14% of Alphabet's total revenue.

We can't leave out Google's pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI). The company began using machine learning for spell-checking search queries way back in 2001. Google acquired DeepMind, a leading AI researcher, in 2014. DeepMind's AlphaGo famously beat Lee Sedol, an 18-time world champion, in Go two years later. Google released a research paper in 2018 that introduced the transformer, a key component of modern large language models (LLMS) and the "T" in ChatGPT. Importantly, Google's AI work helped make its applications and Google Cloud more attractive to users.

New markets to conquer

Fortunately for investors, Alphabet still has new markets that it could conquer. There's a lot more to be done with AI. In particular, agentic AI holds significant near-term potential. The company is also working on artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could be a game-changing technology for the world.

Alphabet's Waymo unit is already a leader in self-driving car technology. Waymo operates autonomous ride-hailing services (robotaxis) in five cities, with more on the way.

Healthcare is another promising frontier. AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts the 3D structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, and ligands, is so important to drug discovery and biological research that its developers won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Alphabet's Calico unit is attempting to extend human lifespan. Its Verily subsidiary focuses on precision health, which combines patients' genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors to create personalized therapies.

Last, but certainly not least, Alphabet's Google Quantum AI is a leader in quantum computing. Google Quantum AI has already achieved two major quantum computing milestones. It hopes to build a large-scale quantum computer that can be used in multiple applications by the end of the decade.

Could Alphabet still be a millionaire-maker stock?

Now for a reality check. Alphabet's market cap stands at roughly $3 trillion. For an initial investment in the ballpark of $10,000 to grow to $1 million would require the company to have a market cap of $300 trillion. That amount is roughly 14.6 times the current market caps of all the "Magnificent Seven" stocks combined.

Is that kind of growth possible for Alphabet? Maybe. Is it probable? No.

That said, I think a higher initial investment in Alphabet (perhaps $100,000 or so) could make you a millionaire over the next 20 years. The promise of AI (especially AGI), robotaxis, and quantum computing is compelling and could open up massive growth opportunities for some companies. I fully expect that Alphabet will be among the biggest winners in all of these areas.

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Keith Speights has positions in Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.