The $100 billion partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI, announced Monday, represents — for now — the latest mega-deal reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape and deepening the relationship between two of AI’s most powerful players.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud is placing a different bet entirely. While the industry’s biggest players cement ever-tighter partnerships, Google Cloud is hell-bent on capturing the next generation of AI companies before they become too big to court.
Francis deSouza, its COO, has seen the AI revolution from multiple vantage points. As the former CEO of genomics giant Illumina, he watched machine learning transform drug discovery. As co-founder of a two-year-old AI alignment startup, Synth Labs, he has grappled with the safety challenges of increasingly powerful models. Now, having joined the C-suite at Google Cloud in January, he’s orchestrating a massive wager on AI’s second wave.
It’s a story deSouza likes to tell in numbers. In a conversation with this editor, he notes several times that nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all GenAI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate.
