Just ran the numbers on Alphabet and honestly, the growth trajectory is harder to ignore than I initially thought.

So here's what caught my attention. Their cloud business is firing on all cylinders - Google Cloud hit $13.6B in revenue with operating income jumping to $2.8B. That's not just incremental growth, that's the kind of margin expansion you see when a business finally hits scale. And this is all happening while they're dumping massive capex into AI infrastructure.

The thing that gets me is how they're balancing both sides. Q2 saw $22.4B in property and equipment spending, and they just raised their full-year capex guidance to around $85B. That's aggressive. But they're still returning capital to shareholders - $13.6B in buybacks last quarter alone. That's the move of a company that actually believes in its own fundamentals.

Let me break down the math because this is where it gets interesting. If you take their trailing-12-month EPS around $9.39 and assume revenue compounds at roughly 12% annually over the next five years, with operating margins staying stable, then earnings per share should track similar growth. Plug in a reasonable 25x price-to-earnings multiple and you're looking at something in the $415 range by 2030.

Now, there's noise in the model - other income has been inflating earnings, and depreciation will climb as all this capex flows through. But cloud margin expansion and ongoing buybacks could offset those headwinds pretty nicely.

The real question is execution. Can they keep the AI investment discipline while maintaining those double-digit revenue growth rates? Recent results suggest they're on track, but regulatory risks and search competition are always lurking. Still, for an Alphabet stock price prediction focused on 2030, this feels like a fairly grounded scenario rather than wishful thinking. The fundamentals are there if they keep executing.