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25 May 2023, Berlin: Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, attends a press event to announce Google as the new official partner of the Women's National Team at Google Berlin. Photo: Christoph Soeder/dpa
(Christoph Soeder/Getty Images)

AI demand grows Alphabet revenue 15% to $88.3 billion

Jon Keegan

Google parent Alphabet’s third-quarter revenue grew 15% to $88.3 billion, with strong growth in its cloud computing business powered by AI computing demand. 

“The momentum across the company is extraordinary. Our commitment to innovation, as well as our long-term focus and investment in AI, are paying off with consumers and partners benefitting from out AI tools,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in a press release.

The AI rush helped Google Cloud generate revenues of $11.4 billion, a year-over-year increase of 35%. The company’s profit increased 37% to $2.1 billion.

Google’s Gemini AI model has been squeezed into pretty much all of its products, resulting in more than 2 billion monthly users of Gemini models.

Though not as sexy as the company’s many AI products, Google’s bread-and-butter search business was still a huge moneymaker, generating about 55% of Alphabet’s revenue, pulling in $49.4 billion, which grew 12% year over year.

YouTube’s Q3 ad revenue grew 12% to $8.9 billion. Youtube Shorts are really dominating the product, with 70 billion Shorts being watched every day, according to the company.

Google advertising revenue was $65.9 billion, a 10% increase year over year. 

Google's Waymo self-driving taxi business is now logging more than 1 million autonomous miles and 150,000 paid rides per week.

Pichai took a moment to boast about its AI researchers, congratulating two Google DeepMind leaders Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their recent shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work related to the AlphaFold2 AI tool, as well as former Google employee Geoff Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel for Physics. 

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Tom Jones

Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s CEO and founder, was also an early Anthropic investor

A chess prodigy and an actual a knight of the realm in the UK, it’s perhaps no surprise that Demis Hassabis has made some strategic moves about his exposure to AI upside. According to people familiar with the matter, the influential AI architect became an angel investor in Anthropic, currently behind many of the leading AI models, per Arena AI leaderboards.

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

Google, which bought DeepMind, the company that Hassabis cofounded and heads to this day, for a reported ~$400 million in 2014, is also a key Anthropic investor. The tech giant reportedly plans to invest up to $40 billion in the AI company as part of the mutually beneficial relationship the pair have forged, with reports that Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion in the other direction on Google’s cloud services over the next five years.

Im playing all sides, so I always come out on top

In addition to his financial support for Anthropic, Hassabis has also invested in a range of AI startups launched by colleagues, such as Inflection AI, a company set up by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman (who is now CEO of Microsoft AI), as well as efforts from other collaborators, like David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Hassabis also emerged as a recurring figure on the fringes of the recent Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial, cropping up repeatedly in testimonies and court documents and appearing to live, as The Verge put it, “rent-free” in Musk’s head.

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

The Nobel Prize winner’s position in the Claude creator was previously undisclosed and, per the Financial Times, highlights Hassabis’ “growing influence across the AI industry.”

Google, which bought DeepMind, the company that Hassabis cofounded and heads to this day, for a reported ~$400 million in 2014, is also a key Anthropic investor. The tech giant reportedly plans to invest up to $40 billion in the AI company as part of the mutually beneficial relationship the pair have forged, with reports that Anthropic has committed to spending $200 billion in the other direction on Google’s cloud services over the next five years.

Im playing all sides, so I always come out on top

In addition to his financial support for Anthropic, Hassabis has also invested in a range of AI startups launched by colleagues, such as Inflection AI, a company set up by DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman (who is now CEO of Microsoft AI), as well as efforts from other collaborators, like David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Hassabis also emerged as a recurring figure on the fringes of the recent Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial, cropping up repeatedly in testimonies and court documents and appearing to live, as The Verge put it, “rent-free” in Musk’s head.

Founded in 2021, Anthropic has recently raised funding at a reported $900 billion valuation, sending it soaring ahead of competitor OpenAI.

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