GOOGL Stock Rises Overnight: Cathie Wood's ARK Buys $96M While Trimming AMD, BIDU Stakes

• ARK’s purchase comes close on the heels of Alphabet announcing plans to raise $80 billion by issuing fresh equity to investors this year.
• ARK has been aggressively buying Alphabet stock since last November.
• Stocktwits sentiment for GOOGL was ‘bullish.’

Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management is loading up on Alphabet stock at a brisk pace, taking advantage of weakness in one of the key Big Tech AI names in a market largely dominated by semiconductor stocks.

On Wednesday, the firm disclosed that it acquired 267,582 GOOGL shares, valued at about $96 million, across ARK’s various funds. ARK took a meaningful position in GOOGL in July last year and has been aggressively loading up since November, when the Google Gemini 3 AI model was released and became a major tailwind for the company.

GOOGL Catalysts

GOOGL shares gained 0.5% in the overnight session ahead of Thursday. They have gained about 15% year to date, second only to Nvidia stock among the Magnificent Seven group. 

Since the release of Gemini 3, Google’s quarterly reports have been markedly stronger. Google Cloud revenue grew 63% to $20 billion in the March quarter, well above analysts' average estimate of a 50.1% increase. That growth rate is the best since the company began breaking out the segment's revenue in 2020.

ARK’s purchase comes close on the heels of Alphabet announcing plans to raise $80 billion by issuing fresh equity to investors this year to fund its AI capacity expansion. That plan raised concerns of dilution of the stock’s value, and GOOGL dropped about 4% on Tuesday, the day after the announcement.

Other ARK Trades

On the other hand, ARK trimmed its position in Advanced Micro Devices and offloaded 74,838 shares of the chipmaker on Wednesday, totaling $39 million. ARK sold $57 million worth of AMD shares just two days ago.

Semiconductor stocks have been on a roll amid surging demand driven by the rapid buildout of new data centers. AMD shares have gained 153% year-to-date, while the broader semiconductor ETF, iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX), has gained 102%.

In other trades, ARK also sold 106,549 shares of Baidu for $14.6 million and 46,670 shares of Teradyne for $18.3 million. It purchased about $4 million in Alibaba Group shares and $3.4 million in Meta Platforms shares.

Retail View On GOOGL

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for GOOGL remained ‘bullish,’ unchanged from the previous day. “The sharks are all circling this name. First Abel, now Cathie Wood,” a trader said, referring to Berkshire Hathaway’s $10 billion commitment for Alphabet’s equity plan. Berkshire Hathaway is led by CEO Greg Abel.

Another wrote: “$GOOGL all aboard, this thing will start to TAKE OFF. Large pension funds, Institutions & Hedgies starting to build their AI positions here on this healthy pullback.”

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