When Nancy Pelosi makes a move on the stock market, people notice.
The former House Speaker has a reputation for timing his stock trades very well. Her portfolio decisions often trigger intense scrutiny from retail investors trying to decipher what the powerful in Washington know that the rest of us don’t.
According to Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker, her stock portfolio is worth about $32.5 million. Notably, she owns two large-cap tech stocks that also pay dividends. By 2026, Microsoft and Alphabet will account for 22% of Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio.
Both dividend-paying tech giants are deeply involved in the artificial intelligence revolution and generating large amounts of cash. Furthermore, they are strategic bets on the future of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
Let me break down why these two stocks matter and what’s really driving their business right now.
Microsoft just finished a quarter that would have made most CFOs cry tears of joy.
Here’s the kicker: Demand is so strong that Microsoft can’t keep up. CEO Satya Nadella admitted that their capacity is limited and will remain so at least until the end of this fiscal year.
Think about it. According to CNBC, Microsoft spends nearly $35 billion every quarter on data centers, GPUs and AI infrastructure, but the construction speed still cannot meet customer demand.
The bet on artificial intelligence is already paying off in real terms.
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Microsoft 365 Copilot is their artificial intelligence assistant for office workers, now used by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies.
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The product has been around for less than 2 years and is already driving significant revenue growth.
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Copilot is priced at $30 per user per month, in addition to existing Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
This is pure profit expansion.
GitHub Copilot, an artificial intelligence coding assistant, currently has 26 million users. Developers receive hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated code suggestions each month, making it mission-critical infrastructure for modern software building.
Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood made key points that investors need to understand during the earnings call.
RELATED: Microsoft’s $80B AI shift: What it does for your money
Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligations, which are essentially contract revenue that has not yet been recognized, amounted to $392 billion.
This number has almost doubled in two years. The weighted average duration of these contracts is only about two years, meaning customers are committing to significant spending over a relatively short period of time.
While Microsoft grabs the headlines for its work in artificial intelligence, let’s not forget that it’s also a dividend grower. The company pays a quarterly dividend of $0.91 per share, yielding about 0.79% at current prices, according to Yahoo Finance.
This won’t shock income investors, but here’s the important thing: Microsoft has raised its dividend every year since 2004, according to Fiscal.ai.
The company can easily afford to continue raising its dividend while spending more than $100 billion annually on AI infrastructure. Most companies have to make a choice. Microsoft doesn’t.
Now let’s talk about Alphabet, which just reported its first quarter of $100 billion in revenue. The company’s revenue grew 16% to $102.3 billion, with Google search alone generating $56.6 billion, a 15% increase.
Here’s what skeptics are wrong about Alphabet. There have been concerns that artificial intelligence could destroy Google’s search business. ChatGPT is considered a Google killer. Instead, Google’s search revenue is accelerating.
Why? Because Alphabet figured out how to make AI improve search, not replace it.
CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled some fascinating AI overview data during the earnings call. He said:
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Query growth Because of these AI capabilities, it’s actually accelerating, not declining.
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this artificial intelligence mode The feature, which allows users to engage in conversational interactions with searches, doubled the number of queries in the quarter.
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it already has 75 million daily active users and is driving incremental growth in the total number of queries.
In other words: People are searching more, not less, because AI makes it easier for us to get answers.
What’s more, Alphabet is monetizing these AI search experiences at about the same rate as traditional search. Advertisers are using artificial intelligence to reach new customers they were previously unable to target.
Google Cloud has been a laggard in the cloud wars for years, behind Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. no longer.
Google Cloud revenue grew 34% to $15.2 billion. Operating margin expanded to nearly 24% in the quarter from 17% a year ago.
What’s the secret? AI infrastructure and Google’s own AI models.
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Google offers the industry’s broadest range of artificial intelligence chips, including NVIDIA GPUs and its own custom TPU chips.
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Nine of the top ten artificial intelligence labs use Google Cloud.
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Anthropic, one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups, recently committed to using up to 1 million Google TPUs.
Google’s own artificial intelligence models are getting a lot of attention.
Their latest model, the Gemini 2.5 Pro, has processed 1.3 trillion tokens and is 20 times faster than the previous version. Google’s Veo video creation model has generated more than 230 million videos.
Google Cloud’s backlog (shrunk but not yet recognized revenue) reached $155 billion, up 82% year over year. Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi noted that Google Cloud signed more billion-dollar deals in the first nine months of 2025 than in the previous two years combined.
Alphabet’s dividend is newer than Microsoft’s, but the company has enough cash flow to support substantial growth. The company generated nearly $74 billion in free cash flow over the past 12 months.
The current quarterly dividend is $0.21 per share, yielding about 0.25%. That’s modest, but look at the trajectory.
Alphabet raised its dividend by 5% this year, and given its cash-generating capabilities, there’s plenty of room for the dividend to continue rising.
Analysts forecast annual dividends per share to increase to $1.13 in 2029 from $0.84 in 2025, according to Tikr.com.
The company ended the quarter with $98.5 billion in cash and marketable securities. They repurchased $11.5 billion of stock during the quarter. The company could easily return more cash to shareholders.
Microsoft and Alphabet are both at inflection points. Artificial intelligence infrastructure construction is underway. This need is tangible and can be measured by billions of dollars in contracts signed.
Microsoft’s artificial intelligence products are already worth billions of dollars every quarter. Google’s AI capabilities are driving query growth and sustaining search monetization rates.
The dividend angle is important because it shows that both Alphabet and Microsoft are mature, cash-generating businesses that are winning the artificial intelligence race. They pay dividends and buy back stock while outspending everyone on AI infrastructure.
If Pelosi’s track record tells us anything, it’s that she tends to buy quality companies when the market underestimates their near-term momentum. Microsoft and Alphabet both fit this description.
The artificial intelligence revolution is costly. It requires hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure spending. Only a handful of companies have the balance sheets and cash flow to compete on this scale. Microsoft and Alphabet are two of them.
Unlike the dot-com bubble, this spending is supported by actual current customer commitments and revenue, rather than promises of future profits. This is the biggest problem a business can encounter when capacity is constrained due to supply exceeding demand.
Related: Google joins Wall Street’s rare valuation milestone club
This article was originally published by TheStreet on January 16, 2026, and first appeared in the Investment section. Click here to add TheStreet as your preferred source.