Sam Altman likes to say that computing is destiny. This week, Google proved him right.
Google’s stock rose 10% after the latest Big Tech results, while Meta, Microsoft and Amazon fell or stalled. If this trend continues, Google could soon overtake Nvidia and become the world’s most valuable company.
What sets Google apart is that it has the most complete set of AI building blocks assembled over decades. The company powers massive data centers, operates millions of chips and servers, and controls global fiber networks. We also design key components such as the TPU.
In a recent ranking of AI computing power, Google took the top spot in a surprising way. Its superiority is becoming decisive. It doesn’t matter how good your AI models, chatbots, or coding tools are. If you can’t deliver AI quickly and reliably to billions of users, they won’t stick around.
That reality has an increasing sense of urgency. Many in the industry believe that top AI models will soon perform as well, and rivals will quickly catch up. If so, the benefits shift from algorithms to distribution.
Google learned this lesson early. Co-founder Larry Page was obsessed with speed. Google’s 2009 paper “Speed Matters” found that slowing down search results by 400 milliseconds reduces usage by nearly 0.5%, decreasing toward 1% over time. At Google’s scale, that’s billions of dollars.
AI increases risk. Each query requires more computing power than a search, making speed even more valuable. This explains why tech giants are spending trillions of dollars on infrastructure.
Google spends more than its competitors, and the benefits are clear. Microsoft’s cloud business is growing strongly, but its growth rate has plateaued as it redirected its capabilities to its own AI tools. Google, by contrast, has enough computing power for both. Despite pouring resources into internal AI projects like Gemini and AI Mode, cloud revenue grew 68% in the latest quarter, and search grew 19%.
This is why Altman is so obsessed with amassing as much compute as possible, even if OpenAI’s finances reach breaking point. The startup had to scrap the project due to insufficient funding. Anthropic recently suffered a similar problem, and the solution is to buy capacity from Google.
If computing is destiny, Google holds the future. At least for now.
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