Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he is “extremely excited” with Openai, the biggest competitor of AI search giants, and as part of his recent partnership, he offers cloud computing resources to train and serve the company’s AI models.
“As for Openai, we are extremely excited to partner with them on Google Cloud,” Pichai said Wednesday in Google’s second quarter revenue call. “Google Cloud is an open platform and has a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs and more. We are extremely excited about our partnership on the cloud side and look forward to investing more in that relationship and growing it.”
The comment came shortly after analysts asked Pichai and other Google executives about how AI will affect the core search business and why Google will be spending an additional $10 billion on capital spending to keep up with the AI race this year. About two and a half years after the launch of CHATGPT, Google is now moving its focus straight on developing key AI models and products to compete with OpenAI.
While ChatGpt is a major threat to Google search, Openai trading marks a large new customer on Google Cloud. It’s a dangerous relationship for Google to navigate. Openai can ultimately use Google’s cloud infrastructure and chips to overturn the company’s core search products.
Earlier this month, Openai quietly added Google Cloud to its public list of suppliers used for cloud computing services, along with Microsoft and Oracle. Reuters previously reported in June that Openai was looking at extra computing power by tapping Google Cloud.
In particular, Google Cloud Revenue rose to $13.6 billion in the second quarter of 2025 from $10.3 billion in the same period last year. Google believes a significant portion of its growth comes from the Google Cloud Platform and other products it offers to AI companies. Google Cloud is still a small business compared to Google Search, but it appears to be growing in the AI era.
Several large AI labs tap Google Cloud as a cloud computing partner, including Humanity, Ilya Satsucaber’s Safe Emergency, FEI-FEI LI’s World Lab, and now Openai. Pichai pointed out in his revenue call that the company has been successful in winning deals with large AI labs thanks to a large supply of NVIDIA GPU chips and in-house TPU chips.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
Google Cloud seems like an clever partner for Openai. Startup is highly constrained with regard to Nvidia GPUs and is used to train new AI models and serve hundreds of millions of users. These constraints are key tension points with Microsoft, Openai’s biggest backer and biggest cloud computing partner, forcing ChatGPT makers to rely on cloud market competitors.
In terms of AI products, Google appears to be better than originally expected. The company said that Gemini, an AI chatbot, has now reached 450 million active users, and its AI overview reaches 2 billion active users each month. However, the business around these products remains unknown, as is the share of queries that we take from Google search.
It’s hard to imagine Pichai being truly excited to work with Openai, the company representing the biggest threat Google search has ever faced. This partnership was reminiscent of a deal with Yahoo with Google several decades ago, when it was just a startup, using Yahoo’s homepage as an accelerator to overtake it as a front door to the internet. It remains to be seen how long Openai’s relationship with Google will last.
Source link
