Sam Altman likes to say that compute is destiny. This week, Google proved him right.
After the latest round of Big Tech earnings, Google’s stock jumped 10%, while Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon either fell or stalled. If this trend holds, Google could soon become the world’s most valuable company, overtaking Nvidia.
What sets Google apart: it has the most complete set of AI building blocks, assembled over decades. The company supplies energy to its massive data centers, operates millions of chips and servers, and controls a global fiber network. It even designs key components, such as TPUs.
In a recent ranking of AI computing power, Google led in a mind-blowing way. That edge is becoming decisive. It doesn’t matter how good your AI model, chatbot, or coding tool is. If you can’t deliver AI quickly and reliably to billions of users, they won’t stick around.
That reality is gaining urgency. Many in the industry believe top AI models will soon perform similarly, with rivals catching up fast. If so, the advantage shifts away from algorithms and toward delivery.
Google learned this lesson early. Cofounder Larry Page was obsessed with speed. A 2009 Google paper, “Speed Matters,” found that slowing Search results by 400 milliseconds reduced usage by nearly 0.5%, drifting toward 1% over time. At Google’s scale, that’s billions of dollars.
AI raises the stakes. 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 is outspending rivals, and the benefits show. Microsoft’s cloud business is growing strongly, but the growth rate has plateaued as it diverts capacity to its own AI tools. Google, by contrast, has enough compute for both: cloud revenue surged 68% in the latest quarter, while Search grew 19%, even as it pours resources into internal AI projects such as Gemini and AI Mode.
This is why Altman is so obsessed with amassing as much compute as possible, even if it stretches OpenAI’s finances to breaking point. The startup has had to scrap projects because it doesn’t have enough. Anthropic has suffered in similar ways lately, and its solution is to buy capacity from Google.
If compute is destiny, Google owns the future. At least for now.
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