By Kit Norton

The tech selloff accelerated Tuesday, and shares of Alphabet continued to fall as Wall Street questioned whether the Google parent is still an artificial intelligence leader after losing a key researcher.

Alphabet stock moved 0.9% lower to $346.60 on Tuesday. That's after shares declined 5% on Monday, marking their largest daily percentage decline in more than a year. Alphabet stock is down more than 8% this month and is 14% below its record closing high of $402.62 from May 13, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Among other Magnificent Seven stocks, Nvidia fell 3.1% and Tesla dropped 4.7% on Tuesday. Meta Platforms rose 0.2%, Amazon.com added 1%, Microsoft gained 1.9%, and Apple advanced 1%.

Alphabet stock's decline in June comes as investors fret about higher interest rates and hyperscalers' aggressive AI spending plans. Alphabet in early June announced plans to raise around $85 billion through equity sales to fund its 2026 and 2027 capital expenditures, reflecting that Big Tech's AI ambitions are outstripping operating cash flows and forcing companies to tap debt and equity markets.

Now Alphabet has also lost two key employees to AI competitors, departures that have Wall Street asking if the company should still be viewed as an AI winner.

The consensus view broadly has been that the Google parent's search and cloud businesses have successfully monetized AI, making it a front-runner in the race for AI dominance. Even Elon Musk proclaimed on March 19 that "Google will win the AI race in the West."

That view on Wall Street might be changing.

On Friday, John Jumper, a senior research scientist and Nobel Prize winner, said he was leaving Google DeepMind, Alphabet's AI backbone, for Anthropic.

His departure comes shortly after Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering at Google and a key member of the Google Gemini team, said he was leaving for OpenAI, the start-up that created ChatGPT.

The personnel changes signal to Wall Street that Alphabet may be losing out on AI talent to competing companies, which may mean it could fall behind in technological advances.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Barron's on Monday that the departures of Shazeer and Jumper clearly raise the concern that Google is losing the war for AI talent.

A Jefferies analyst team led by Brent Thill on Monday wrote that the Alphabet stock selloff is mostly due to losing key employees, along with general softness after high profile initial public offerings -- like SpaceX -- and ahead of the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.

"We expect this talent musical-chairs dynamic to persist given AI scarcity," Thill wrote, adding that he remains optimistic about Alphabet "given its long AI heritage" and accelerating cloud growth.

"The AI talent war is clearly intensifying," Thill added. "With IPO-bound frontier labs increasingly winning the bid for elite researchers."

Despite the brain drain from Alphabet, Thill wrote that the downward pressure on the stock isn't a sign that Google is losing its edge in the AI model race.

"We don't read the recent departures as a signal that Google is doing less with AI, but rather as another data point in an industry-wide war for talent in which frontier labs are aggressively bidding," he wrote.

Write to Kit Norton at kit.norton@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 23, 2026 11:17 ET (15:17 GMT)

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