Alphabet has a high bar to clear when it reports earnings Wednesday.

The company’s stock price soared 38% in the third quarter, its best quarterly performance in two decades. It’s continued to rally, climbing 11% so far in October, closing at a record on Monday.

With revenue growth stuck in the low teens of late, and expected to come in at 12% next year, investors have recalibrated their expectations after witnessing speedier growth in the years before the 2022 slowdown. Much of the recent optimism centers around Google’s improved position in the artificial intelligence race. 

However, the biggest catalyst for the stock in the third quarter had more to do with Google’s relative weakness in AI, compared with its standing in online ads. 

Alphabet shares soared in early September, when Google avoided the worst-case scenario in its search antitrust case. Following the government’s victory in its case against the company last year, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in the remedies decision last month that Google would not be forced to sell off its Chrome browser, but must share data with competitors. 

Mehta said that the rise in AI services from companies like OpenAI has created plenty of new competition in search. Backing up his point, OpenAI last week unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, an AI-powered browser that could directly challenge Chrome.

While investors immediately cheered Mehta’s ruling, Google now has to show that it’s a force in AI, which is serving as the growth engine for the tech sector. Google’s cloud unit benefits from the AI boom as companies count on the technology for running large language models and expanding workloads. And Google is heavily investing in Gemini, its family of AI models, products and services. 

Over the weekend, analysts at KeyBanc Capital Markets raised their price target on Alphabet to $300 from $265, expecting that third-quarter results will “show that faster product velocity is driving momentum in Search, Cloud and Waymo,” its autonomous vehicle business.

The stock pop, the analysts wrote, is due to “a combination of the DOJ Search remedies trial being more favorable than expected and more signs of progress in AI across business units.”

Alphabet is scheduled to report results after the bell on Wednesday, alongside rivals Microsoft and Meta. Apple and Amazon report the following day. 

Wall Street is expecting to see revenue growth of 13% to $99.89 billion and earnings per share of $2.26, according to LSEG. 

Mehta dedicated roughly 30 pages of the 226-page filing to explaining generative AI and the market as it exists today. He described the space as “highly competitive” and wrote that there have been “numerous new market entrants” with access to “a lot of capital.”

ChatGPT accounts for about 81% of the global AI chatbot market, according to September data from StatCounter. Perplexity is second at 11%, followed by Microsoft Copilot at 4.1% and Gemini at 2.8%, the firm said. 

But Google is aggressively pushing Gemini as far more than just a ChatGPT competitor, and is taking advantage of its strength in various markets for distribution. 

Earlier this month, the company launched Gemini Enterprise, targeting corporate clients with agents that perform specific work tasks. In September, Google announced it was rolling out Gemini in Chrome to Mac and Windows users in the U.S. as well as to mobile devices, allowing users to ask Gemini for help understanding the contents of a particular web page, work across tabs, or do more within a single tab, such as schedule a meeting or search for a YouTube video.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said this month at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference that Gemini 3, the latest version of the company’s AI model, will be released this year. 

Analysts at Mizuho said in a report about the internet market last week that “competitive risks from OpenAI across the internet landscape, particularly at Google, have been topic #1” in more than 100 recent conversations with investors. 

Still, they said that they see “competitive fears likely to recede as we refocus on fundamentals with earnings.” For Google, the “imminent roll-out of Gemini 3 could further tilt the sentiment for Alphabet shares toward AI-winner, at least near term,” they wrote. 

Even as the remedies resolution was generally welcomed by investors, the company will have to make some concessions, according to the judge’s ruling. Most notably, Google has to make available certain search data and user data to its “qualified competitors.”

Determining which companies fall into that category will be the job of a technical oversight committee at a date that hasn’t yet been announced. 

Services like DuckDuckGo and Microsoft Bing may be among the beneficiaries, potentially receiving improved access to some of Google’s search index data under specific licensing arrangements. 

Mehta wrote that the data-sharing remedies “can help to close the sizeable advantage Google has in answering long-tail queries, thereby improving product quality and attractiveness to new users.”

Baird analysts wrote that they expect a “modest” impact to Google, because the company doesn’t have to share its data with generative AI competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI. That would have been “more problematic,” the Baird analysts wrote.  

Google, which plans to appeal the ruling, declined to comment, but pointed to an earlier blog post on the judge’s decision. 

“We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely,” the company wrote. 

Abiel Garcia, a former deputy attorney general for the California Department of Justice, working in antitrust, said he doesn’t see the ruling having an impact on the way Google operates.

“Maybe some of the data will help competitors’ products at the periphery, but I don’t think this is going to really shift anything,” Garcia, who’s now a partner at Kesselman, Brantly & Stockinge, told CNBC. “It almost encourages Google’s roll-the-dice behavior.”

WATCH: Google’s search empire under fire

Securitize, the “real world assets” platform that powers BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, will go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, CEO Carlos Domingo told CNBC in an exclusive interview.

The fintech firm will merge with Cantor Equity Partners II, Inc., a blank-check company sponsored by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald that trades under the CEPT ticker. The deal values Securitize’s business at $1.25 billion in pre-money equity.

“Tokenization is what everybody’s talking about … but there’s nobody publicly traded that does it,” Domingo told CNBC. “We will do well in the public market because people want to index themselves to tokenization the same way that people are buying Circle because they want to index themselves to stablecoins.”

Tokenization refers to the registration of ownership rights to real-world assets such as stocks, bonds or gold on a blockchain. The process enables more transparent and around-the-clock trading versus traditional methods, according to its proponents — among whom are Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

Following the merger, the combined entity Securitize Corp.’s stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SECZ. Shares could begin trading on the exchange as soon as January, according to Domingo. 

The company will book $465 million in gross proceeds from the deal. That includes $225 million from private investors including Borderless Capital and Hanwha Investment, and $240 million in the SPAC’s trust account, assuming no redemptions. 

The deal comes as tokenized RWAs boom. The combined market value of tokenized U.S. Treasurys has climbed to roughly $8.6 billion as of writing time, up more than 200% over the past year, according to data provider RWA.xyz.

The RWA tokenization market as a whole has ballooned 135% over the past year and is now worth $35 billion, the data shows. Citi analysts see massive growth for the tokenized RWA market, saying it could grow to almost $4 trillion by 2030.

That positions Securitize — which Domingo says has been profitable in recent quarters — to jump into the fray of firms aiming to capitalize on growing demand for digital assets. Earlier this year, Circle debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, raising about $1.1 billion in its blockbuster IPO. Cryptocurrency exchanges Gemini and Bullish also went public earlier in 2025.

Tapping public markets will create winners and losers as the digital asset space continues to grow and mature, Domingo added.

“The crypto industry needs to consolidate,” he said. “If you’re publicly traded and you have access to stock capital markets as well as cash, you can be on the side that is consolidating and not be consolidated by somebody else.”

Securitize is the largest tokenization platform, dominating 20% of the RWA tokenization market, per RWA.xyz.

The company plans to also digitize its own equity, a move designed to demonstrate how the public company process and trading can move on-chain, Domingo told CNBC. The executive sees a future in which everything is brought on-chain.

“There’s $400 trillion out there of assets that could potentially be tokenized,” Domingo said. “It’s an upgrade … within the next five to 10 years, you will see everything will be on-chain, because it’s just a better ledger.”

Meta’s AI app has seen a major jolt in downloads since launching its Vibes feed of AI-generated videos, giving investors a glimpse of the company’s artificial intelligence strategy ahead of Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings.

Since releasing Vibes on Sept. 25, the Meta AI app’s downloads on both iOS and Android are up 56% month-to-month to a total of 3.9 million downloads as of Oct. 18, according to data provided to CNBC by mobile research firm Appfigures.

“That’s what I’d call standout growth,” said Appfigures Head of Insights Randy Nelson, adding that “the month’s not even over.”

Still, OpenAI’s rival Sora app, which launched Sept. 30, appears to have more momentum despite only being available on Apple’s iOS platform and requiring an invitation for use. From Sept. 30 through Oct. 18, Sora saw 2.6 million downloads on iOS, compared to the 1.1 million downloads of the Meta AI app, according to Appfigures.

Sora’s early popularity isn’t surprising to nearly a dozen creators, marketers and brand agencies that spoke with CNBC about about their interest and use of the AI tools.

Meta declined to comment.

Creators and marketers say they generally find Sora easier to use. Among the key distinctions is Sora’s capability of producing more realistic looking videos that show people talking, while Vibes only lets users choose select songs as accompanying audio.

The Vibes feed is filled with surreal, playful content, ranging from four lions sharing a pizza in the jungle to a hedgehog singing karaoke.

Meta has been paying creators to produce AI-generated videos for Vibes as a way to boost the visibility of the app, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meta has sought out influencers who specialize in generative AI tools provided by the startup Midjourney, and is requiring them to sign non-disclosure agreements, according to the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to comment on the matter.

Meta’s evolving AI strategy

The Facebook parent debuted the Meta AI app in late April, confirming an earlier CNBC report. The app was originally called Meta View and was used by owners of the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to manage their device settings, import photos and perform other utility functions.

The app, which is still used to manage Ray-Ban Meta glasses, was relaunched as Meta AI to serve as the company’s hub for users to interact with the social media firm’s ChatGPT-like AI assistant, but the September launch of Vibes added a video feed component similar to that of TikTok. The key difference is that all of the content found on the Vibes feed has been created entirely by AI generators.

Unlike Sora, which is powered by OpenAI’s proprietary model, Meta AI’s Vibes feature relies on models provided by third parties like Midjourney and Black Forest Labs, according to a Threads post last month from Alexandr Wang, Meta’s chief AI officer and the former CEO of Scale AI. Meta is also developing its own internal generative AI technology, Wang wrote.

Meta’s reliance on third-party AI models to power Vibes underscores the company’s newfound willingness to seek outside help as it tries to get its AI technology back on track. The underwhelming launch of Llama 4 in April spurred CEO Mark Zuckerberg into spending billions of dollars to shake up Meta’s AI organization and install new leaders like Wang, CNBC previously reported.

That overhaul continued last week, when Meta laid off 600 employees in its AI organization. The company spared Wang’s core TBD Labs group, which now overseas touchstone AI efforts like Llama.

Meta’s AI strategy is sure to be a major topic in the company’s third-quarter earnings report and investor call on Wednesday. For the quarter, analysts expect revenue growth of 22% from a year earlier to $49.4 billion, according to LSEG. Wall Street expects revenue growth for the full year of 19% to $196.2 million.

Some of the influencers that Meta is paying to populate Vibes are based in India, where Sora is not yet available and TikTok is banned. 

Company executives have previously said that Meta AI usage, largely accessed via the company’s WhatsApp service, is the highest India, the world’s most-populous country, even though not all influencers there get paid.

“One of the biggest reasons that got me excited is because I’ve been in the creator ecosystem for almost 15 years now,” said Gaurav Bisen, a creator from India who posts 10 to 15 times a day on Vibes but isn’t paid by Meta. “Creating content on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube takes a lot of time, energy and investment. But here, it’s so easy. You just type a prompt.”

Bisen said he’s found early traction on Vibes, where his following has grown to more than 25,000. He said he’s learned that short, animated dance clips perform best.

“People who didn’t have the confidence to come in front of a camera can now create from their imagination,” Bisen said. “You can produce creative content without even being in it.”

Still, engagement on Vibes remains limited compared to Instagram or TikTok. Most creators told CNBC that their posts average fewer than 10 likes and almost no comments.

Instead, Vibes users measure success through “remixes” – a feature that lets creators take an AI-generated video, edit the prompt and repost it as their own.

“Remixes kind of seem like the currency on the app,” said Dylan McIntyre, who runs the AI video account JunkBoxAI on Instagram, where he has more than 1.3 million followers but just 22,000 on Vibes. “People are liking what they’re seeing and want to make their own and repost it.”

Meta is leaning heavily into generative AI as it courts creators and competes with OpenAI. Its AI Studio tool lets users build customizable AI characters and chat with them across Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Investors will also be listening for commentary on the company’s Metaverse strategy.

Meta confirmed on Monday that Vishal Shah, who spent the past four years leading metaverse initiatives, is now helping run AI products as part of the company’s Superintelligence Labs division, which is led by recent high-profile hires, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Shah, who will now report to Friedman, was previously a vice president of product at Instagram. The Financial Times first reported on Shah’s new position.

WATCH: Partnership with Meta for smart glasses helps lift EssilorLuxottica sales.