Predicting the world's biggest stock - did Antipodes' Vihari Ross get it right, and what is she backing next?

At last year's Livewire Live, Antipodes Partners' Vihari Ross made the shocking prediction that Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) would be the most valuable Mag 7 company within the next five years. 

And it's important to remember how the market was seeing the tech giant back then. At the time, investors were worried that AI, especially ChatGPT, were about to eat Google's lunch on the company's bread and butter - internet search. It seemed the first true existential threat to a company that had effectively monopolised one of the internet age's most valuable markets. 

Amidst the fears, GOOG found itself trading at a PE of 15 and a 20% discount to the rest of the S&P 500, despite growing faster than its tech peers. As Ross told Livewire Live this week, Alphabet was “being priced like all of their underlying and strategic assets didn’t exist, and Gemini itself didn’t exist."

And while AI did pose a threat to Google's business model, it was arguably overestimating its impacts from a revenue point of view. As Ross told Livewire Live a year ago, what's more important is how you can monetise that search.

"Commercial search is what matters,” she says. “When people are searching with an intent to buy, where they're searching, where an ad can actually be served in response to that query," she explains.

In fact, AI search, which Google has now also incorporated into its existing search engine and through its AI assistant Gemini, actually serves up more ad-serving opportunities.  

In its 2Q26 results, Alphabet announced total revenue had risen 24% YoY to US$119.8 billion, with operating margins up 34%, and Google Search remained the primary search preference for 78% of users. 

So was she right?

Between October 2025 and May 2026, GOOG rallied almost 60% from around US$250 a share to just under US$400 as the market began to see Google as a potential net winner from AI instead of a net loser. 

As Ross said at Livewire Live, "people realised they had 7 different apps with more than a billion users in which they could deploy their AI, and Gemini itself is growing rapidly. That was then reflected in the multiple.”

But did it become the most valuable Mag 7 stock?

Almost. 

In May, Alphabet's market cap hit US$4.8 trillion, just shy of Nvidia's US$5.2 trillion market cap, but never managed to take top spot from the AI chipmaker. But the thesis was proven correct and GOOG turned out to be a "classic mispriced opportunity" as Ross had argued a year earlier. 

According to Ross, Antipodes has now fully exited its position in GOOG, presumably for a tidy profit. 

The stock she's backing now

As part of the Livewire Live session titled "5 Years From Now These Are the Stocks Everyone Will Wish They Owned, Ross and Ophir's Andrew Mitchell revealed the stocks they're backing now for the years ahead. 

One of Ross's picks for the company investors will wish they owned five years from now is Taiwanese chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TPE 2330).  

TSMC is a great business," said Ross. "It is growing its earnings at 40% per annum - it's just had another upgrade. It's exerting pricing power, it has 70% gross margins, it has AI revenues growing at 60% and it's deploying capex with demand intact. 

"If it was a business that wasn't listed in Taiwan, it would trade at 40 times, but it trades at a teens multiple."

"Unlike a lot of stuff in hardware, which is just a commodity trading on peak multiples and peak earnings, this is a business with a monopoly and unique capabilities."

To get the full list of stocks Ross and Mitchell are backing next, stay tuned for the full coverage of the session coming soon.