Nvidia and Google are safest AI bets in public markets: Intelligent Alpha CEO

Doug Clinton, CEO of Intelligent Alpha, was asked a simple question in a recent interview: which AI companies are the safest bets for investors in public markets right now? His answer:

I think in the public markets it’s probably Nvidia and Google. Nvidia is still the king. They power all of the inference essentially of all these model makers, whether it’s OpenAI or Anthropic.

— Doug Clinton, Intelligent Alpha CEO

I’ve been following the AI infrastructure trade pretty much every quarter for the past three years now, and Clinton’s framing cuts to the heart of why Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is so hard to bet against. Every major model maker, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, runs inference on Nvidia hardware. That’s a toll bridge at the center of the AI economy.

Nvidia: The Infrastructure You Can’t Route Around

The numbers back Clinton up. Nvidia posted $68.13 billion in Q4 FY2026 revenue, up 73.2% year over year, with Data Center revenue of $62.31 billion, up 75% YoY. Networking revenue — the connective tissue of AI factories — surged 263% YoY to $10.98 billion. For the full fiscal year, Nvidia generated $96.58 billion in free cash flow.

CEO Jensen Huang’s Q1 FY2027 guidance calls for roughly $78 billion in revenue, excluding China data center compute. The stock trades at a forward P/E of 22x against that growth trajectory, with 60 analyst buy ratings and a consensus price target of roughly $268. Prediction markets on Polymarket currently assign a 63% probability that Nvidia finishes 2026 as the world’s largest company by market cap.

Google: The Most Accessible Model Builder

Clinton’s second pick is Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), which he called the most accessible public model builder available to investors right now. With OpenAI and Anthropic still private, that’s a meaningful distinction.

Google Cloud grew 48% year over year in Q4 2025 to $17.66 billion, with cloud operating income more than doubling. The Gemini app now has 750 million monthly active users, and Gemini models process 10 billion tokens per minute. Annual revenue crossed $400 billion for the first time in 2025.

The risk worth watching is the $175 to $185 billion in CapEx guided for 2026. That’s an enormous bet on AI infrastructure. Sundar Pichai has said the investments are already driving revenue across the business, and the $155 billion cloud backlog as of Q3 2025 suggests the demand is real.

Clinton also noted that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all expected to come public later in 2026, which would reshape the investable AI landscape. Until then, his logic holds: Nvidia owns the infrastructure layer, and Google is the most complete AI business a public market investor can access. Those two facts alone make this a pairing worth taking seriously.