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The nervous Nellies in the investor community sold tech stocks again on Thursday, dragging down the Nasdaq 0.4%. Sounds like a normal day in February 2026, you might say. But it’s striking how anxieties about the disruption caused by AI continue to weigh on stock prices, including those of leading AI firms like Google, even as private AI leaders are raising new money at ever-higher valuations. If investors are liking OpenAI at a valuation of $830 billion, that should in theory be good for Google stock as well.
Google shares have outperformed those of other big tech names lately, to be sure, but even it is down 3% so far this year. And Google looks cheap compared with OpenAI. At $830 billion, the ChatGPT creator is valued at 14 times its projected 2027 revenue. Google, meanwhile, is trading at 6.7 times estimated 2027 revenue, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. I can hear the objections to that comparison: Google is a mature company, while OpenAI is still building its business. In other words, OpenAI deserves a higher multiple because its revenue is more likely to skyrocket in future years. That’s a perfectly fair point, except for a couple of things.
One, OpenAI loses a lot of money and expects to continue doing so for years. Whether it can ever turn profitable is a real question. Oh, and Google has pretty much everything OpenAI has in AI—except for the constant management drama—plus a bunch more money-making businesses. Who would you rather bet on?
What’s getting lost in this rush to exit tech stocks is that some of these companies are going to come out of the AI transition even more powerful and rich. Google, it seems obvious, will be in that category. Microsoft, a 27% shareholder in OpenAI that is a major cloud provider and was early in selling AI-powered software, may very well be another one. So may Amazon, the leading cloud provider. Investors are very unsure about both Amazon and Microsoft based on their stock performances over the past year. But this is the time for those investors to think independently.
Klarna’s ‘Fantastic’ Growth Turns Off Investors
Talk about investor skepticism! The stock of Klarna dropped 27% on Thursday, after the “buy now, pay later” lender reported mixed fourth-quarter earnings. Revenue grew 38%, what CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski called “really fantastic growth” on a call with analysts. Investors, though, seemed to focus on the fact that Klarna’s profit margin was below the company’s projections.
Klarna management blamed that shortfall on consumers adopting its expanded range of loans faster than the company had expected. It has to record provisions for losses on those loans immediately, while profits get recorded later, executives explained. So Klarna’s pitch is that the weaker margin was actually a good thing! I guess you could call Klarna a “sell now, buy later” stock.
In Other News
• Etsy saw its profit dip in the fourth quarter, even as revenue grew slightly, the company said Thursday, a day after the online marketplace said it would sell Gen Z–focused clothing resale app Depop to rival eBay for $1.2 billion.
• Netflix sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that ByteDance take immediate steps to prevent its AI video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, from producing content that resembles the U.S. streaming giant’s characters, titles or settings, according to Deadline.
• Blue Owl Capital limited redemptions from an investment vehicle that provides loans to private companies, sending its shares tumbling and pulling down those of other investment firms with large credit businesses. The move exacerbated long-brewing concerns about private credit, a growing business for the largest publicly traded asset managers.
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