Gemini's utilization rate jumps to second in the market. TD Cowen raises target price for Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) to $270.

Cowen raised its target price for Alphabet Inc. Class C (GOOGL.US) from $240 to $270 and maintained a "buy" rating, based on the results of its annual survey on Generative AI (GenAI) in the public cloud sector. The analysis team led by John Blackledge pointed out that although Alphabet Inc. Class C's cloud platform (GCP) showed strong performance in the survey, it still lags behind market leaders Amazon.com, Inc. AWS (94% awareness) and Microsoft Corporation Azure (93% awareness) - this year's survey showed an overall awareness of 80%, ranking third; enterprise customer groups had the highest awareness at 88%, while other business groups ranged from 70% to 80%. In terms of new choices for cloud service providers, GCP ranked second, with about 44% of respondents planning to adopt GCP in the future (second only to Azure), and 38% of respondents expecting to replace their current service providers with GCP (up from 36% last year). In terms of willingness to replace existing providers, GCP came in third at 38%, lower than Azure (72%) and AWS (67%). In the field of Generative AI, Alphabet Inc. Class C's Gemini model became the second most commonly used large language model (LLM) provider, chosen by 54% of respondents as the underlying model for GenAI tools, up from 50% in the 2024 survey. OpenAI had a share of 73%, still in first place, but lower than last year's 82%, reflecting a trend towards diversified choices in the market. Of note, Anthropic, which was not included in last year's survey, ranked third with a share of 35%, while Meta Platforms (META.US) ranked fourth with a share of 24% with its Llama model.