IT Home In an October 21 report, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said today that the company is shifting part of its compute from the cloud business to frontier AI R&D to fully support frontier AI development.
For Google, developing frontier AI is costly, requiring large amounts of computing resources and chips—resources that could otherwise be sold at high prices to the cloud business. Pichai said that investing resources in frontier AI research is Google's "fundamental essence."
The CEO also said that customers currently seeking to lock in compute capacity for 2027 will face great difficulty, citing reasons including the two to three years needed for data centers to go from decision to operation, as well as a surge in demand for agentic tasks. He explained: "Our cloud business can forgo short-term revenue at any given moment because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development."