The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that Alphabet investors are growing increasingly confident that the company's semiconductors could represent a significant driver of future revenue for Google's parent. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post reports that the success of Alphabet's tensor processing unit, or TPU, chips is a primary reason for the stock's 31-per-cent fourth quarter rally, which is the 10th best performance in the S&P 500 Index. The TPUs were always seen as a major strength internally, accelerating growth for the company's cloud-computing business. However, there is rising optimism that Alphabet could start selling the chips to third parties, creating a new revenue stream that could ultimately be worth almost a trillion dollars. "If companies want to diversify away from Nvidia, TPUs are a good way to do it, and that means there s a lot of reason to be optimistic," said DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria. A Nvidia spokesman pointed to a recent comment by chief executive officer Jensen Huang about the company's competitive advantage: "As a company, you're competing against teams. And there just aren't that many teams in the world who are extraordinary at building these incredibly complicated things."