The “Google’s winning” narrative has some real traction all of a sudden. Maybe you noticed.

Late last week, I highlighted what one popular Wall Street strategist described as the “Into Google with Everything Else as a Source of Funds” trade, manifested most poignantly in 15ppt of outperformance for Alphabet versus Microsoft over just five sessions.

The catalyst is Gemini 3, and specifically the consensus that it’s superior to other models which it generally outscored on a variety of standardized benchmarks. Sam Altman’s concerned enough that he penned an internal memo addressing what many now describe as Google’s “leapfrog” moment.

In the earliest of this week’s holiday trade, shares of Alphabet built on what are now stupendous gains.

As the figure shows, the stock’s up 50% in three months. It’s doubled since April.

In his latest, JonesTrading’s Mike O’Rourke pointed to a pair of new articles (“How Google Finally Leapfrogged Rivals With New Gemini Rollout” in the Journal and “Maybe Google Does Win It All” in The Information) in noting that recent developments “certainly give the impression that OpenAI’s rush to announce megadeals was an attempt to ingratiate itself in the order books of the top tech companies in search of achieving something akin to too-big-to-fail status.”

In other words: People are starting to ask if the scale of Altman’s spending commitments — which sum to nearly $1.5 trillion for a company with just $20 billion in revenue — as well as the hurried pace with which they were announced, is evidence that he knew Google was on the brink of a breakthrough and sought to inoculate OpenAI the only way he knew how.

The problem for Altman (and thereby for Microsoft and really for everyone in this race) is that Google sort of is the internet. Alphabet’s thereby even more synonymous with life in the 21st century than the other players in the tech oligopoly.

Recall what I said about AI demand a few weeks back:

[The] tech giants have the ability to create demand for AI and also to grow that demand and sustain it. You can barely turn around in the connected world without running into AI in some form. These companies are going to make AI so ubiquitous that you have no choice but to use it.

That’s from “Should Taxpayers Preemptively Bail Out OpenAI?” a piece documenting controversial remarks from Altman’s CFO Sarah Friar who, at a The Wall Street Journal event, alluded to a government backstop for AI infrastructure borrowing.

In that same article, I wondered if Altman’s “real genius lies in creating the conditions wherein OpenAI has to be preemptively bailed out via a government guarantee for bank and PE financing lest the company should have to renege on some of the spending commitments driving the AI hype cycle.”

Altman went out of his way to clarify Friar’s remarks (he said OpenAI doesn’t need nor want a government backstop), but in the wake of Alphabet’s leap forward, I’d be remiss not to point out that if a company with a de facto monopoly on the internet itself manages to achieve anything like AI model supremacy, everyone else is in a really bad spot.

O’Rourke touched on that too. “We expected Google’s global ubiquity would drive adoption [but if] it is [also] the better product, that is a formidable obstacle,” he said, adding that “schools can block the websites of the various AI chatbots, but it is a far more challenging task to block Google search, which includes AI Mode.”

And then there’s the “small” matter that Google trained Gemini 3 on its own chips. That, O’Rourke went on, “even raises doubts as to whether Nvidia should still be considered the top AI company in the world.”

Dear Google: As you monopolize AI too, please remember that once upon a time, your motto was “Don’t be evil.”