Sundar Pichai is ‘very excited’ about Google Cloud’s OpenAI partnership

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he’s “very excited” to produce OpenAI, the search big’s largest competitor in AI, with cloud computing sources to coach and serve the corporate’s AI fashions as a part of a lately struck partnership.

“With respect to OpenAI, look, we’re very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud,” mentioned Pichai on Google’s second-quarter earnings name on Wednesday. “Google Cloud is an open platform, and we now have a robust historical past of supporting nice firms, startups, AI labs, and many others. So tremendous enthusiastic about our partnership there on the cloud facet, and we sit up for investing extra in that relationship and rising that.”

The remark got here shortly after analysts peppered Pichai and different Google executives with questions on how AI would have an effect on its core search enterprise and why Google is spending an additional $10 billion on capital expenditures this 12 months to catch up within the AI race. Roughly two and a half years because the launch of ChatGPT, Google has now shifted its focus squarely on creating main AI fashions and merchandise to compete with OpenAI.

ChatGPT is a serious risk to Google Search, however the OpenAI deal marks an enormous new buyer for Google Cloud. It’s a treacherous relationship for Google to navigate; OpenAI might in the end use Google’s cloud infrastructure and chips to upend the corporate’s core Search product.

Earlier this month, OpenAI quietly added Google Cloud to a public checklist of suppliers that it makes use of for cloud computing providers, alongside Microsoft and Oracle. Reuters beforehand reported in June that OpenAI was contemplating tapping Google Cloud for further computational energy.

Notably, Google Cloud income soared within the second quarter of 2025 to $13.6 billion, up from $10.3 billion in the identical quarter final 12 months. Google attributes a major chunk of that development to the Google Cloud Platform and different merchandise it gives to AI firms. Google Cloud continues to be a small enterprise relative to Google Search, nevertheless it appears to be rising within the AI period.

A number of giant AI labs have tapped Google Cloud as a cloud computing companion, together with Anthropic, Ilya Sutskever’s Protected Superintelligence, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and now OpenAI. Pichai famous on the earnings name that the corporate has been profitable at successful offers with giant AI labs due to its giant provide of Nvidia GPU chips and in-house TPU chips.

Google Cloud looks like a sensible companion for OpenAI. The startup is extraordinarily constrained with regards to Nvidia GPUs, which it makes use of to coach new AI fashions and serve them to a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of customers. These constraints have been a serious stress level with OpenAI’s largest backer and largest cloud computing companion, Microsoft, forcing the ChatGPT maker to show to its opponents within the cloud market.

On the AI merchandise entrance, Google appears to be doing higher than initially anticipated. The corporate mentioned its AI chatbot, Gemini, now reaches 450 million month-to-month lively customers, and AI Overviews reaches 2 billion month-to-month lively customers. Nevertheless, the enterprise round these merchandise stays unclear, as does the share of queries they’re taking from Google Search.

It’s laborious to think about that Pichai is actually that enthusiastic about working with OpenAI, an organization that represents the most important risk Google Search has ever confronted. The partnership is paying homage to Google’s take care of Yahoo from a long time in the past, when it was only a startup, and used Yahoo’s homepage as an accelerant to overhaul it because the entrance door to the web. How lasting OpenAI’s relationship with Google is stays to be seen.