{"id":346726,"date":"2026-03-19T04:38:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T04:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/346726\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T04:38:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T04:38:14","slug":"heres-my-top-ai-stock-pick-during-this-market-pullback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/346726\/","title":{"rendered":"Here&#8217;s My Top AI Stock Pick During This Market Pullback"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the market experiencing a recent pullback, many investors are likely scouring their watchlists for high-quality stocks trading at a discount. And while several big tech names have taken a hit recently amid concerns over massive infrastructure spending, one company stands out as an especially compelling opportunity: Alphabet (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/quote\/nasdaq\/goog\/\" class=\"font-bold hover:underline\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">GOOG<\/a> 1.00%)(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/quote\/nasdaq\/googl\/\" class=\"font-bold hover:underline\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">GOOGL<\/a> 1.00%).<\/p>\n<p>Shares of the search giant have cooled off, trading down from their recent all-time high of about $350 to around $306 as of this writing. But despite the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/terms\/g\/growth-stock\/\" class=\"text-cyan-900 hover:text-cyan-800\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">growth stock<\/a>&#8216;s recent breather, the underlying business is performing exceptionally well.<\/p>\n<p>The company is benefiting from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/terms\/a\/artificial-intelligence\/\" class=\"text-cyan-900 hover:text-cyan-800\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">artificial intelligence (AI)<\/a> both directly through its enterprise cloud business and indirectly across its sprawling consumer ecosystem. For investors looking for a resilient AI stock to buy today, here is why Alphabet is my top pick.<\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"A warehouse filled with computer servers.\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"880\" height=\"495\" decoding=\"async\" data-nimg=\"1\" class=\"h-auto max-w-full rounded object-contain\" style=\"color:transparent\"   src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1773895094_930_.jpeg\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"caption\">Image source: Getty Images.<\/p>\n<p>A booming, highly profitable cloud business<\/p>\n<p>When investors think of Alphabet, they often think of digital advertising. But the company&#8217;s cloud computing business, Google Cloud, is quickly becoming the star of the show.<\/p>\n<p>Highlighting the company&#8217;s underlying momentum, Alphabet&#8217;s fourth-quarter revenue rose 18% year over year to $113.8 billion. Fueling this top-line acceleration was a staggering 48% year-over-year jump in Google Cloud revenue to $17.7 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Even more, this cloud revenue is flowing nicely to Alphabet&#8217;s bottom line.<\/p>\n<p>Google Cloud&#8217;s operating income more than doubled year over year to $5.3 billion. Further, the segment&#8217;s operating margin expanded from 17.5% in the year-ago quarter to 30.1% in the fourth quarter. This segment margin expansion suggests that Google Cloud has finally achieved the scale needed to meaningfully drive Alphabet&#8217;s consolidated earnings rather than just subsidizing its top line.<\/p>\n<p>And that momentum is well supported by backlog growth. Capturing the unique predictability of its enterprise demand, Google Cloud ended 2025 with a massive $240 billion backlog &#8212; up 55% sequentially. <\/p>\n<p>Adding some context to the segment&#8217;s uncanny growth &#8212; especially with larger customers &#8212; CEO Sundar Pichai noted during Alphabet&#8217;s fourth-quarter earnings call that &#8220;The number of deals in 2025 over $1 billion surpassed the previous three years combined.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Efficiencies across the AI ecosystem<\/p>\n<p>Beyond enterprise cloud contracts, Alphabet is actively threading AI into the products that billions of consumers use every day. AI is enhancing products across Alphabet&#8217;s core search business, YouTube, and Google Workspace.<\/p>\n<p>With that said, the transition to an AI-first world is incredibly expensive.<\/p>\n<p>Alphabet&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/terms\/c\/capital-expenditure\/\" class=\"text-cyan-900 hover:text-cyan-800\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">capital expenditures<\/a>, or spending on physical assets such as data centers and servers, totaled $91.4 billion in 2025. And management expects 2026 capital expenditures in the range of $175 billion to $185 billion.<\/p>\n<p>A spending surge of this magnitude can make investors nervous about the company&#8217;s future <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/terms\/p\/price-to-free-cash-flow\/\" class=\"text-cyan-900 hover:text-cyan-800\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">free cash flow<\/a>, or its cash flow from operations less capital expenditures.<\/p>\n<p>But Alphabet is getting smarter about how it deploys this technology. The company is actively utilizing AI to improve the engineering efficiency of its own workforce, and it&#8217;s always looking for ways to enhance efficiencies in its data centers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We were able to lower Gemini serving unit costs by 78% over 2025 through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements,&#8221; Pichai explained during the call.<\/p>\n<p>Priced for reality, not perfection<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there is a reason the stock has pulled back recently. Wall Street is worried that heavy AI investments will weigh on profit margins in the near term.<\/p>\n<p>But at today&#8217;s price, the market seems to be more than accounting for these risks. As of this writing, Alphabet trades at a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fool.com\/terms\/p\/pe-ratio\/\" class=\"text-cyan-900 hover:text-cyan-800\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">price-to-earnings ratio<\/a> of about 28 &#8212; not a cheap valuation but definitely an attractive one given Alphabet&#8217;s recent business momentum.<\/p>\n<p>With that said, there are scenarios in which the stock couldn&#8217;t work out well from here. The biggest risk is that its major cloud computing investments don&#8217;t deliver adequate returns. But another key risk is the company&#8217;s heavy dependence on advertising &#8212; something that could take a hit in a weak macroeconomic environment.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, however, I believe Alphabet offers one of the most balanced risk-reward profiles among AI stocks today. The company has a diversified, cash-rich business and a rapidly accelerating cloud segment.<\/p>\n<p>If you are looking to buy the dip, I think this is a great place to start. Of course, this doesn&#8217;t mean this is the bottom. Shares could fall even more. But I do think that the stock will perform well over the long haul from here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the market experiencing a recent pullback, many investors are likely scouring their watchlists for high-quality stocks trading&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-346726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346726\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}