Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet | The All-In Interview

Google says AI search is already preserving the economics of its core business rather than destroying them. AI Overviews reach more than 1.5 billion users, Google sees query growth where they appear, ad revenue has reached the non-AI baseline, and Pichai says serving costs have fallen sharply enough that latency matters more than cost.

Google’s biggest structural AI advantage may be infrastructure built long before the current boom. It trains Gemini internally on its own TPUs, is deploying seventh-generation chips, and plans roughly $75 billion of 2025 capital spending, with about half of compute investment going to Google Cloud while still using Nvidia GPUs where useful.

Sergey Brin is personally working inside the Gemini effort at an unusually technical level. Pichai says Brin sits with engineers, examines loss curves, discusses model architecture and post-training, while both Brin and Larry Page remain in frequent contact with him—giving Alphabet active founder involvement during its most important technological transition in years.

DeepSeek convinced Google that Chinese AI labs are closer to the frontier than many outsiders assumed. Google’s internal benchmarking found its own Flash models comparably efficient or better, but Pichai believes hardware constraints forced DeepSeek into valuable efficiency innovations and expects China to remain highly competitive in frontier AI.

Google is already compute-supply constrained, with mundane physical bottlenecks becoming strategically important. Pichai says Cloud capacity is constrained this year and projects are being delayed by permitting and shortages of electricians, making power generation, transmission, grid upgrades and skilled labor increasingly important limits on how quickly AI infrastructure can expand.

Pichai expects quantum computing to reach a practical breakthrough within roughly three to five years. He compares quantum today with AI around 2015 and expects a computation clearly superior to classical machines to create the field’s “aha” moment, with Google ultimately exposing useful quantum capabilities through its cloud platform.

Google believes AI has finally made robotics commercially interesting after its earlier hardware push came too soon. Pichai says Gemini-based vision-language-action models have changed the equation, estimates robotics may be two to three years from a major breakthrough, and confirms Google is exploring an “Android for robotics” model alongside possible first-party products.

Google once seriously debated buying Netflix. Asked for one major missed acquisition, Pichai named Netflix and said the company had discussed the deal “super intensely,” offering a rare glimpse at an alternate path in which Google might have owned one of the defining streaming businesses rather than building alongside it.