5 Stocks with the Biggest Buybacks

2. Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL)

Stock Buybacks in 12 Months Through September 2023: $60.7B

Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) had about $60.7 billion in stock repurchases in the one-year period through September 2023, according to S&P Dow Jones data.

In April 2023, Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said its board approved a massive $70 billion stock buyback program.

Wedgewood Partners stated the following regarding Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:

“In 2023 Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) was a top contributor to portfolio performance thanks to its search revenues accelerating due to the investments they have been making in AI over the past several years. The Company has spent almost $150 billion on research and development in just 5 years, creating products and services that helped drive a more than doubling of revenues. For example, almost 80% of the Company’s advertising customers use an AI-enabled tool when they run their Google Search and YouTube campaign.

Although the Company was criticized by the media for being “late” to the AI party when they rolled out a Gen-AI chatbot after Microsoft, Google has been creating scaled, context-aware AI functions for at least a decade, such as semantic search. While not necessarily a “large language model (LLM),” semantic search has become a mainstay in all-things search – predicting what users want to see or type before they type it. Consumers probably do not really care what kind of AI framework is being used behind the technology they are using, as long as it is useful to them – but these AI features are what have helped drive the rapid growth of Alphabet’s Google franchise…” (Click here to read the full text)