Pershing Square (PSH ) fund manager Bill Ackman has added Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL.O) to his concentrated portfolio of US equities as the internet giant seeks to regain its 2021 pandemic peak.

Filings made to the US Securities Exchange Commission by Ackman’s New York-based Pershing Square Capital Management showed the firm bought 8.1 million class C shares and 2.2 million class A shares in Nasdaq-listed Alphabet.

Pershing’s $1.1bn stake represents a tiny fraction of the $1.5tn Alphabet, whose shares have rallied 34% this year to $119.51 below their all-time high above $148 in November 2021 before inflation and soaring interest rates caused a selloff in growth and technology stocks.

However, it accounts for around 9% of the £8.9bn Guernsey-domiciled but London-listed investment company, according to JP Morgan Cazenove analysts.

Alphabet, which last month reported first-quarter revenue of $69.8bn, up 3% year-on-year and above analyst predictions of $68.9bn, ranks sixth in a portfolio that has a market value of just £5.7bn due to the shares trading at a 36% discount to their net asset value.

It stands out in a list of stocks led by Universal Media Group and including the Hilton hotel group, restaurant chain Chipotle and DIY provider Lowe’s.

Ackman has not yet commented on the Alphabet stake but had previously hinted that the new unnamed position had been positive for a closed-end fund that has risen 3.6% this year.

The stake in Alphabet is the first major move Ackman has made since he piled into Netflix in January 2022 and exited just months later at a hefty estimated cost of $400m after the shares tanked when the streaming platform revealed it lost subscribers for the first time in a decade.

Despite that setback, the FTSE 100-listed investment company has provided a 70.1% return to sterling shareholders over three years, beating the 46% from the S&P 500.