TD Cowen has raised its target price for Alphabet (GOOGL.US) from $240 to $270 while maintaining a "Buy" rating, based on findings from its annual survey of the generative AI (GenAI) public cloud sector.

The analyst team, led by John Blackledge, noted that while Google Cloud Platform (GCP) demonstrated solid performance in the survey, it still trails market leaders Amazon AWS (94% recognition) and Microsoft Azure (93% recognition). This year's survey showed GCP's overall recognition rate at 80%, placing it third. Enterprise customers showed the highest recognition of GCP at 88%, while other business segments ranged between 70% and 80%.

In terms of new cloud service provider selection, GCP ranked second, with approximately 44% of respondents planning to adopt GCP in the future (trailing only Azure). Additionally, 38% of respondents expect to replace their existing service providers with GCP, up from 36% last year. When it comes to willingness to replace existing suppliers, GCP ranked third at 38%, below Azure (72%) and AWS (67%).

In the generative AI sector, Alphabet's Gemini model has emerged as the second most commonly used large language model (LLM) provider, with 54% of respondents selecting it as the underlying model for their GenAI tools, an increase from 50% in the 2024 survey. OpenAI maintained its leading position at 73%, though this represents a decline from last year's 82%, reflecting the market's trend toward diversified choices.

Notably, Anthropic, which was not included in last year's survey, captured third place with a 35% share, while Meta Platforms (META.US) secured fourth position with its Llama model at 24%.