Google is expanding its AI empire — and losing the people who built it
Frustrations over access to compute can be especially acute when Google announces large infrastructure commitments to competing labs like Anthropic, whose...
Key points
- Frustrations over access to compute can be especially acute when Google announces large infrastructure commitments to competing labs like Anthropic, whose models compete directly with Gemini, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
- One of the people said Google has projections for demand in different areas, including research and model training, serving products such as search and Gemini, and working with cloud customers.
- Pichai has said on the past two earnings calls that Google continues to prioritize DeepMind's compute needs even as demand from cloud customers grows.
- Asked in July about TPU allocation, he said Google's "first priority" is securing the compute needed to compete at the frontier in AGI development, calling that work "the foundation for everything we do." Pichai went on to say that Google balances that need against the capacity required to run its consumer products and AI models, while increasingly placing TPUs directly in third-party data centers to help satisfy external demand.
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Frustrations over access to compute can be especially acute when Google announces large infrastructure commitments to competing labs like Anthropic, whose models compete directly with Gemini, sources with knowledge of the matter said. One of the people said Google has projections for demand in different areas, including research and model training, serving products such as search and Gemini, and working with cloud customers. Pichai has said on the past two earnings calls that Google continues to prioritize DeepMind's compute needs even as demand from cloud customers grows. Asked in July about TPU allocation, he said Google's "first priority" is securing the compute needed to compete at the frontier in AGI development, calling that work "the foundation for everything we do." Pichai went on to say that Google balances that need against the capacity required to run its consumer products and AI models, while increasingly placing TPUs directly in third-party data centers to help satisfy external demand. Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management and a Google shareholder, said access to compute is a natural source of tension. "Google has all of these other businesses, and they've...