Google LLC’s parent company Alphabet Inc. became the fourth U.S. firm to hit a $1 trillion market capitalization today, Reuters reported.

Alphabet now joins Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as one of three American firms worth more than $1 trillion.

Apple hit the milestone in June 2018 and currently has a market value of $1.4 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the U.S. Microsoft became the next U.S. firm to top the $1 trillion milestone in April 2019 and is now ranked second with a value of $1.3 trillion.

Reuters said this is the first time three American firms have been valued at over a trillion dollars at the same time. Amazon.com Inc. also hit a $1 trillion market cap in September 2018, but that stock’s fortunes were quickly reversed and it’s now worth $930 billion.

The most valuable company in the world remains the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., better known as Aramco, which went public last month and is valued at $1.8 trillion.

Alphabet’s value topped $1 trillion less than a month after founder Larry Page announced he was stepping down as its chief executive officer, to be replaced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Much of Alphabet’s growth in the past couple of years has resulted from optimism around its cloud infrastructure business. Although Google Cloud remains a distant third place behind cloud leaders Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure, it did manage to double its revenue rate from $1 billion to $2 billion per quarter between February 2018 and July 2019. Moreover the company has continued to pour extensive resources into the cloud business, with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian last year promising to triple its sales force over the “next few years.”

“Fittingly it was Apple, primarily a consumer platform vendor, that first broke the $1 trillion valuation, as hardware needs to be there and infinite connectivity via smartphones is the first phase towards infinite computing,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “Amazon was next with the digital transformation of retail, and then Microsoft with its portfolio of consumer and business software. Now Google, the company founded to bring order to the internet, joins the party.”

“Google‘s DNA actually gives it a leg up over the rest of the $1 trillion club, as it operates at internet scale for all its offerings,” Mueller added. “It’s now up to Pichai and Kurian to create more shareholder value beyond the $1 trillion mark.”

The next U.S. company to hit a $1 trillion market cap could be Facebook Inc., but it has a ways to go: It was valued at $620 billion at the close of trading Thursday.

Photo: Christoph Dernbach/Flickr