GOOGL moving ahead of AMZN as the most widely held name across your 22 curated guru portfolios looks real enough on the face of it: the list shows 13 managers in Alphabet versus 12 in Amazon. But the more useful conclusion is not “gurus love Google now.” It’s that Alphabet has become the easier stock to own at scale for fundamental investors who want AI upside without swallowing Amazon’s heavier capital appetite.
Start with the business quality. Alphabet finished 2025 with revenue of $402.8 billion, operating income of $129.0 billion, and net income of $132.2 billion. In the same year, Amazon posted revenue of $702.8 billion and operating income of $68.6 billion. Bigger sales are nice. Fatter operating economics are nicer. If you’re a concentrated manager trying to defend a position to your own LPs, Alphabet’s mix of Search, YouTube, and Cloud is simply easier to underwrite than a business that still has to prove every dollar of infrastructure spending is earning an adult return.
The capex contrast is where the story gets interesting. Alphabet said on its February 4, 2026 earnings release that 2026 capital expenditures are expected to land between $175 billion and $185 billion. That is an eye-watering number, but management paired it with Google Cloud revenue up 48% to $17.7 billion in Q4 and a year-end Cloud run rate above $70 billion. In other words, the spending is at least attached to visibly accelerating demand. Amazon, by contrast, still asks investors to trust that ever-larger infrastructure and fulfillment investment will keep compounding through AWS, ads, logistics, devices, and the retail machine all at once. That can work. It is just a messier memo.
Valuation helps explain the holder-count flip too. As of early May 2026, Alphabet traded at roughly 29x earnings, while Amazon traded around 33x earnings. That is not a canyon, but when one company is producing 32% operating margins in 2025 and the other produced an operating margin of about 9.8% for 2025, you do not need to be Ben Graham to see why more managers can talk themselves into Alphabet as the cleaner bargain.
Market action probably reinforced that drift. By early May 2026, Alphabet’s market value had reached about $4.7 trillion, ahead of Amazon at roughly $2.9 trillion. Size alone does not make a stock better, but it does affect institutional comfort. A giant, liquid franchise with elite margins and credible AI optionality tends to end up in more portfolios than a giant, liquid franchise where the debate never quite ends over how much of the story is genius and how much is glorious overbuilding.
There is also a simple portfolio-construction point hiding in your table. AMZN still has the higher average weight in this guru set, at 7.08% versus 4.51% for [GOOGL](/stock/GOOGL). That matters. It suggests Amazon remains the stock people size up when they have a strong view, while Alphabet is the stock more managers are willing to own at all. Breadth is not the same as conviction. One is a popularity contest; the other is a wallet test.
And that distinction fits what we can see in at least some reported manager behavior. Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square, for example, appears to have increased its Amazon position in Q1 2026 while slashing its Alphabet position. So even if Alphabet won the holder count in your curated basket, the underlying tape is not a universal march toward Google and away from Amazon. It is more nuanced: more firms can justify having Alphabet, while some high-conviction investors still prefer sizing Amazon.
That nuance matters because a holder-count leaderboard can become a very silly statistic if you let it pretend to be a valuation framework. The count says Alphabet is now the more broadly acceptable “core” megacap among this guru set. It does not say Alphabet is universally preferred. It does not say Amazon is broken. And it certainly does not say you should buy whichever name won by one manager, as if this were college football.
If anything, the switch reflects three sober facts. First, Alphabet entered 2026 with faster visible profit conversion and a 2025 operating margin around 32%. Second, Amazon still commands larger position sizes among believers, as shown by your higher average portfolio weight. Third, both are now being judged through the same AI lens, but Alphabet currently offers the cleaner story: dominant legacy cash engine, accelerating Cloud, fewer moving parts, and a valuation that is not obviously more expensive than Amazon’s.
That is usually enough to win a census.
What to watch: if both companies keep spending aggressively on AI infrastructure through the rest of 2026, which one shows the better incremental return on that capex — Alphabet through Cloud/Search monetization, or Amazon through AWS, ads, and retail efficiency? That answer matters a lot more than who won the guru headcount by one seat.