Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia (NVDA +1.80%), has been talking a lot about agentic artificial intelligence (AI) in recent weeks.

He’s right to do so, as agentic AI represents the next leap in AI technology.

No matter how advanced modern AI programs might seem when you interact with them, the way they function is, in essence, identical to how an ordinary computer program does.

You input a prompt, and the AI outputs an answer to that prompt. It’s functionally no different from using a word processor. You input key presses on your keyboard, and your computer outputs letters on your screen.

However, with an agentic AI program, you could give it general instructions and have it interact with the internet on your behalf.

While the technology is still in its infancy, Google’s parent company, Alphabet (GOOG +0.08%)(GOOGL +0.34%), has already emerged as an early leader in it.

Somewhere, beyond the sea

Subscribers to Google’s $250/month AI ultra plan get access to Project Mariner, the company’s experimental AI agent.

Project Mariner is fully integrated into Chrome and can interact with websites on behalf of its human supervisor through it. For example, Project Mariner can purchase your tickets to a sporting event or concert, or even buy groceries for you online.

It still can’t interact with the physical world on your behalf, it can’t even interact with the internet outside of one browser, but it is far closer to what many of us likely imagined when AI programs first started coming onto the scene in 2022.

There are competitors, of course, both OpenAI and Anthropic offer Operator and Computer Use, respectively. But I think it’s Alphabet that has the most potential for a few reasons.

Google, Google that for me

I’ll start with Alphabet’s edge over OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither of them has turned a profit yet.

Now, both companies have plans to achieve profitability, and Anthropic is far closer to achieving it with a stated goal of 2027 to 2028, but neither one will rival Alphabet anytime soon.

For instance, Anthropic is projecting $70 billion in annual revenue by 2028. Alphabet generated $113.8 billion in Q4 of 2025 alone, which represented 18% growth over Q4 2024, and it managed a net profit margin of 32.81%.

Put simply, Alphabet has way more resources to throw into its AI program than either of the two most prominent companies focused on the industry.

And the meteoric rise of Google Gemini, Alphabet’s answer to Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is further proof of Google’s rising dominance in the AI space.

Back in 2023, ChatGPT controlled a 50% share of the Enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) market. Meta controlled 16%, Anthropic had 12%, and Google Gemini was sitting at a paltry 8%.

Fast forward to the end of 2025, and ChatGPT’s market share has fallen to 27%, and it’s likely to soon be overtaken by Google Gemini, which has surged to 21% market share. Meta, meanwhile, has lost half its market share and fallen to 8% while Anthropic’s Claude has grown to 40% market share.

But Alphabet is set to profit from Anthropic’s rise as well.

Today’s Change

(0.08%) $0.23

Current Price

$299.02

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$3.6T

Day’s Range

$298.03 – $303.37

52wk Range

$142.66 – $350.15

Volume

22M

Avg Vol

21M

Gross Margin

59.68%

Dividend Yield

0.28%

From cyberspace to reality

Unique among its AI peers, which all rely on Nvidia‘s graphics processing unit (GPU), Alphabet is building its own AI hardware, the tensor processing unit (TPU), which it designed in collaboration with Broadcom (AVGO +4.08%).

I’ll spare you the technical details, but there are some key differences in role and cost that mean the TPU and GPU are not necessarily interchangeable. But the TPU does represent one of the first real competitors to Nvidia’s hardware dominance.

And Anthropic announced late last year that it planned to add up to one million TPU chips to its hardware through 2026, or about one gigawatt of computing capacity. So, even when its apparent rivals win, so too does Alphabet, which is an enviable position for a company to be in, wouldn’t you say?

So, given Google’s emerging AI dominance and the fact that it’s one of only a handful of companies to bring an agentic AI to market, albeit in an experimental prototype capacity, I think it’s well poised to be a frontrunner in the agentic step of AI’s evolution as a technology.

As the U.S.-Israeli-Iran conflict rattles oil markets, Japanese consumers are stockpiling toilet paper—a product with no connection to the disruptions whatsoever, but that has caused enough problems for the country that the Japanese government has urged citizens to stop buying ahead of time. Still, social media posts depicting empty toilet paper abound.

But why would people panic buy goods unrelated to or not affected by the conflict? Panic buying behaves much like a bank run. Nobody knows exactly where it starts—some single, bleating data point that says this store is going to run out of toilet paper, or this bank is going to run out of money. 

Back in the olden days that data point, a verifiable person, would run and holler at their neighbors; “Hey Johnny, take your money outta the bank! They’re about to run out!” and Johnny would go a-running. Now someone posts on social media that COVID-19, tariffs, or the war with Iran is going to nuke toilet paper stock, and strangers across the country start loading up their carts. 

Pandemic-era panic buying is making a comeback

This was the situation with the great panic of COVID-19. On March 12, 2020, toilet paper sales surged 734% compared to the same day the year before, making it the top-selling grocery item in the world that day. By the time the Great Toilet Paper panic of 2020 was over, 70% of the world’s grocery stores would have run out at some point—a record.

The shortage was so severe it caused a measurable shift in American bathroom habits: Bidet sales spiked and, for many households, stuck. But researchers who studied the episode afterward found no actual supply chain disruption for toilet paper. Production was steady and distribution was intact. Rather, the shortage was almost entirely a creation of panic and hype.

Now the panic buying is back—this time in Japan—and in some ways it makes even less sense. During COVID, supply chains across every sector were under strain, so the instinct to stockpile had, at least, a logical ambiance. Today, the disruptions are due to tightening in oil markets tied to the conflict in Iran, and little to do with consumer packaged goods. But Japan has its own deep history with toilet paper panic, and that history has its own logic.

Japan’s history with toilet paper panics

The original Japanese toilet paper crisis came in 1973, also triggered by turmoil in the Middle East over oil. It began when Yasuhiro Nakasone, then the minister of international trade and industry, called on the public to conserve paper products. The announcement was meant to signal some austerity. Instead, it sparked rumors that paper supplies were running out—and Japanese consumers, particularly women managing household budgets, began buying enormous quantities of toilet paper. Academics have described the panic as a response to the growing instability of the middle class, a fear their livelihoods were held up by smoke and mirrors.

Since then, Japan has raced for its toilet products every time a crisis rolls around. The devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011 triggered the same kind of hoarding behavior, though apparently there were some actual disruptions in affected regions. Now, the cycle is repeating itself.

What makes toilet paper the perennial target? It’s bulky and distinctly finite—when it’s gone from the shelf, it’s conspicuous. And unlike food, which you consume and replace in a rhythm, toilet paper occupies a kind of psychological category all its own, a symbol of long-term stability and responsibility. 

“The importance of toilet paper…runs deep into the soul of modern culture,” anthropologist Grant Jun Otsuki wrote about the COVID shortage in 2021. “The mere thought of the disappearance of toilet paper from the world spurs some to act so quickly and decisively to secure their own supplies.”

So far, the panic doesn’t appear to have spread far beyond Japan—except, perhaps, to neighboring Australia, where Perth has reported some early signs of stockpiling. As if the hollering from across the water finally reached the next set of ears.