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Good morning,
This week’s Stratechery Interview is with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. Kurian joined Google to lead the company’s cloud division in 2018; prior to that he was President of Product Development at Oracle, where he worked for 22 years. I previously spoke to Kurian in March 2021, April 2024, and April 2025.
The occasion for these interviews, at least for the last three years, is Kurian’s annual keynote at Google Cloud Next. You can watch the keynote here, and read the blog about Google’s announcements here. I spoke to Kurian a week ago, on April 15, and at that time only had access to the afore-linked blog post.
With regards to the keynote, which I have since watched, I thought it was a powerful opening: Kurian returned to last year’s theme, about a unified architecture, but emphasized that the use cases were no longer theoretical or pilots but running at scale for real users. He also emphasized — in a foreshadowing of a point we discussed below — that Google itself was running on the same infrastructure as Google Cloud. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, meanwhile, talked about Google’s capex investment, and that (1) half of it was going towards Google Cloud, and (2) that Google Cloud was running the same stack as Google itself. I sense a theme! Pichai also emphasized security, a point that Kurian was also careful to raise in our talk, before discussing the shift to agents.
