Alphabet joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Monday, replacing Verizon Communications in the 30-stock index, S&P Dow Jones Indices said. Alphabet stock rose roughly 4% on its first day as a Dow component.
S&P Dow Jones Indices said Alphabet’s portfolio — spanning advertising, cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence, hardware, autonomous mobility, healthcare technology, and media distribution — makes it a stronger representative of the Communication Services sector than Verizon. Because the Dow is a price-weighted index, Verizon had accounted for only about half a percentage point of the benchmark due to its lower share price, the index manager said.
The scale of that required purchasing is expected to be small, however: as of December 31, 2024, assets indexed to the Dow totaled around $115 billion, a fraction of the approximately $20 trillion benchmarked to the S&P 500 — an index where Alphabet already holds membership, according to Reuters. Alphabet stock is also already included in the Nasdaq 100, further limiting forced buying tied to the index change.
Despite Monday’s gain, Alphabet stock has faced sustained selling pressure in June. Over the prior seven weeks, the stock had closed lower in six of them, putting it on pace for its most damaging month since February of last year, according to CNBC. The slide stands in contrast to May, when Alphabet’s after-hours valuation momentarily climbed above Nvidia’s, briefly making it the largest company in the world by market cap.
Investors have been questioning the returns on Alphabet’s AI spending as lower-cost Chinese models push pricing lower and key researchers have departed for competitors. Noam Shazeer, who co-led the Gemini AI models, left for OpenAI, while Nobel Prize recipient John Jumper departed Google DeepMind for Anthropic. To fund its position in the AI infrastructure race, the company has tapped debt and equity markets for more than $140 billion in total, and its first-quarter earnings marked the first time in close to ten years that Alphabet did not repurchase shares.
Enterprise customers seeking access to Alphabet’s computing resources have reportedly run into constraints, with the company said to be relying on third-party infrastructure providers to manage the shortfall.
Through its most recent close, the stock had gained around 11% in 2026, placing it near the top of the Magnificent Seven’s year-to-date leaderboard.
A separate change also took effect Monday: Honeywell International completed a spin-off of its aerospace division, after which it was renamed Honeywell Technologies and remained in the Dow. The newly independent Honeywell Aerospace was not added to the index, S&P Dow Jones Indices said.
