Not anymore.
Google owner Alphabet Inc.’s shares rose as much as 3.22% in New York on Tuesday. The company is on track to hit a $4 trillion market capitalization for the first time.
“Google has arguably always been the dark horse in this AI race,” said Neil Shah, analyst and cofounder at Counterpoint Research. It’s “a sleeping giant that is now fully awake.”
For years, Google executives have argued that deep, costly research would help the company fend off rivals, defend its turf as the leading search engine and invent the computing platforms of tomorrow. Then ChatGPT came along, presenting the first real threat to Google search in years, even though Google pioneered the tech underpinning OpenAI’s chatbot. Still, Google has plenty of resources that OpenAI doesn’t: a corpus of ready data to train and refine AI models; flowing profits; and its own computing infrastructure.
“We’ve taken a full, deep, full-stack approach to AI,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer for Google and Alphabet, told investors last quarter. “And that really plays out.”
Meta declined to comment on the report on Monday night.
“We’re delighted by Google’s success,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in a statement Tuesday. “They’ve made great advances in AI, and we continue to supply to Google.” The spokesperson added: “Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry – it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”
Analysts read the Meta news as a signal of Google’s success. “Many others have failed in their quest to build custom chips, but Google can clearly add another string to its bow here,” Ben Barringer, head of technology research for Quilter Cheviot, wrote in an email.
Consumer interest is harder to gauge. Google said last week that 650 million people use its Gemini app. OpenAI recently said ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users. As of October, Gemini’s app had 73 million monthly downloads, well shy of ChatGPT’s 93 million monthly downloads, according to research firm Sensor Tower.
Google’s TPUs are mostly attractive to a handful of companies with big computing bills, like Meta and Anthropic, said Meryem Arik, CEO of the AI startup Doubleword.
And the chip industry is “not a zero-sum game with just one winner,” said Barringer.
For one, AI developers can only access Google’s chips through the company’s own cloud service. They can use Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, more flexibly. “As soon as you use TPUs, you’re locked into” the Google cloud ecosystem, said Arik.
Being tied to a single supplier might have been something companies avoided. That’s no longer the case for Google, thanks to its advances in AI.
“It’s definitely fair to say that Google is back in the game with Gemini 3,” said Thomas Husson, analyst at Forrester. “In fact, to paraphrase a quote attributed to Mark Twain, reports of Google’s death have been widely exaggerated, not to say irrelevant.”
