In today's Reuters Morning Bid podcast, hosts Peter Devlin and Amanda Cooper dive into the blistering ascent of Big Tech and the pulse of consumer spending just as Black Friday kicks off. With Alphabet on the cusp of joining the ultra-exclusive $4 trillion market cap club—rubbing shoulders with Apple and Nvidia—the episode unpacks how AI fervor is rewriting Wall Street's leaderboard. Meanwhile, fresh U.S. retail sales figures paint a resilient picture for holiday shoppers, despite tariff pressures and sticker shock. Here's the rundown, straight from the tape.Alphabet (GOOGL), Google's parent, is charging toward history. Shares surged over 5% on Monday to a record $315.90, ballooning its market cap to $3.82 trillion—edging ever closer to the $4T threshold. Premarket trading Tuesday showed another 4% pop, putting it on track to breach the mark when bells ring. This would make it just the fourth company to hit that stratosphere, after Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple.The rocket fuel? Alphabet's AI resurgence. Once fretted as lagging in the ChatGPT era, the firm has flipped the script: Google Cloud is now a growth beast, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway piled in as a new investor, and the Gemini 3 model is earning rave early reviews. Year-to-date, GOOGL is up nearly 70%—smoking rivals like Microsoft and Amazon. Rumors of hyperscalers like Meta eyeing Alphabet's TPUs (its AI chips) added extra thrust, potentially siphoning Nvidia's turf.
