Shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) traded slightly lower Thursday after the company delivered fourth-quarter and 2025 full-year results. It wasn’t those data points that spooked investors. Rather, it was the company’s announcement that it could spend up to $185 billion this year on various artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
That’s well above the expenditures expected by Wall Street and double what Alphabet spent on AI in 2025. For traders that see the forest through the trees, opportunity could soon emerge with the Direxion Daily GOOGL Bull 2X Shares (GGLL ) — an ETF that delivers 200% of Alphabet’s daily performance.
That geared ETF could be worth considering over the near-term and at various points in the months ahead. Indeed, the aforementioned AI spending jitters may be overshadowing some important truths. First, Alphabet wouldn’t be spending to that extent if it didn’t see potential returns from that spending. Second, those expenditures could result in a durable AI moat for the company. After all, only a handful of rivals can compete on that spending level.
“While capex guidance for 2026 was considerably above expectations, we think the resulting infrastructure footprint creates a meaningful moat that few (if any) can replicate, and perhaps just as importantly, one that Alphabet can best monetize via the combination of its broad service offering (both advertising and subscriptions) as well as through the rapidly accelerating Cloud business,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black in a Thursday report to clients.
More Catalysts in Place for GGLL
Yes, investors should remember that GGLL is a short-term instrument. However, the geared ETF’s utility could shine through at various points this year. In fact, Alphabet is already seeing benefits from previous AI spending, including cementing its dominance in internet search.
“In Search, AI investments are truly expanding the pie for Alphabet: These new features are driving an improvement in ads quality (or higher conversions), better understanding of user intent (improved ability to deliver ads against a greater proportion of searches), new AI user experiences (new surfaces to monetize against like AI Mode) and AI ad user tools (which drives both efficacy and efficiency of spend for Alphabet’s advertising partners),” added Black.
The company is already generating benefit from AI spending. That fact bolsters the case for GGLL as an occasional trade this year. It also fortifies the notion that some investors could be overreacting to the 2026 capex program.
“On the monetization side, AI Max is already used by hundreds of thousands of advertisers, unlocking billions of net-new queries,” concluded Black. “We see this as a powerful greenfield growth vector as the vast majority of search queries are not directly commercial in nature. As such, even modest improvements in identifying (and capitalizing on) commercial-adjacent queries could unlock meaningful incremental growth opportunities for Google.”
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