Pichai Says Google Cloud Is Forgoing Revenue to Prioritize Frontier AI Compute

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is giving its frontier AI work first claim on compute, even at the expense of short-term cloud revenue.

Argon usage. Pichai told Big Technology that Gemini 4 Argon reached almost 25 trillion tokens used in its first 72 hours after launch, about three times what Gemini 3.0 handled in its first 72 hours. He said Google is capacity constrained as it serves the model.

Cloud trade-offs. "Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development," Pichai told Big Technology. He described investing in the compute needed for frontier research as "ground zero" and "non-negotiable," with Google DeepMind's research and model work planned first and other businesses planned after.

Compute is short across the industry. Pichai told Big Technology that Google's compute today reflects decisions made in 2024, that companies broadly are short of capacity, and that a customer asking for compute in 2027 today would be "incredibly difficult" to accommodate.

Buildout outlook. Pichai told Big Technology that overbuilding is possible because of component constraints or economic shocks, but that he is confident Google will have uses for the compute it is planning given enough time.

The interview was conducted by Alex Kantrowitz for the Big Technology Podcast at Google's Mountain View headquarters.