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

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he’s “very excited” to provide OpenAI, the search big’s largest competitor in AI, with cloud computing assets 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’ve got a robust historical past of supporting nice firms, startups, AI labs, and so on. So tremendous enthusiastic about our partnership there on the cloud aspect, and we stay 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 yr 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 growing main AI fashions and merchandise to compete with OpenAI.

ChatGPT is a significant 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 finally 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 list of suppliers that it makes use of for cloud computing companies, alongside Microsoft and Oracle. Reuters beforehand reported in June that OpenAI was contemplating tapping Google Cloud for extra computational power.

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 yr. Google attributes a major chunk of that progress to the Google Cloud Platform and different merchandise it presents to AI firms. Google Cloud remains to be a small enterprise relative to Google Search, but it surely 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 because of its giant provide of Nvidia GPU chips and in-house TPU chips.

Google Cloud looks as if a wise 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 tons of of tens of millions of customers. These constraints have been a major tension point with OpenAI’s biggest backer and largest cloud computing partner, Microsoft, forcing the ChatGPT maker to show to its rivals 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 energetic customers, and AI Overviews reaches 2 billion monthly active users. Nonetheless, the enterprise round these merchandise stays unclear, as does the share of queries they’re taking from Google Search.

It’s exhausting to think about that Pichai is actually that enthusiastic about working with OpenAI, an organization that represents the largest risk Google Search has ever confronted. The partnership is harking back to Google’s cope with 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.