Google CEO Sundar Pichai says he is “very excited” to supply OpenAI, the search giant’s largest competitor in AI, with cloud computing resources to train and serve the company’s AI models as part of a recently struck partnership.
“With respect to OpenAI, look, we are very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud,” said Pichai on Google’s second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. “Google Cloud is an open platform, and we have a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs, etc. So super excited about our partnership there on the cloud side, and we look forward to investing more in that relationship and growing that.”
The comment came shortly after analysts peppered Pichai and other Google executives with questions about how AI would affect its core search business and why Google is spending an extra $10 billion on capital expenditures this year to catch up in the AI race. Roughly two and a half years since the launch of ChatGPT, Google has now shifted its focus squarely on developing leading AI models and products to compete with OpenAI.
ChatGPT is a major threat to Google Search, but the OpenAI deal marks a massive new customer for Google Cloud. It’s a treacherous relationship for Google to navigate; OpenAI may ultimately use Google’s cloud infrastructure and chips to upend the company’s core Search product.
Earlier this month, OpenAI quietly added Google Cloud to a public list of suppliers that it uses for cloud computing services, alongside Microsoft and Oracle. Reuters previously reported in June that OpenAI was considering tapping Google Cloud for extra computational power.
Notably, Google Cloud revenue soared in the second quarter of 2025 to $13.6 billion, up from $10.3 billion in the same quarter last year. Google attributes a significant chunk of that growth to the Google Cloud Platform and other products it offers to AI companies. Google Cloud is still a small business relative to Google Search, but it seems to be growing in the AI era.
Several large AI labs have tapped Google Cloud as a cloud computing partner, including Anthropic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and now OpenAI. Pichai noted on the earnings call that the company has been successful at winning deals with large AI labs thanks to its large supply of Nvidia GPU chips and in-house TPU chips.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Google Cloud seems like a smart partner for OpenAI. The startup is extremely constrained when it comes to Nvidia GPUs, which it uses to train new AI models and serve them to hundreds of millions of users. Those constraints have been a major tension point with OpenAI’s biggest backer and largest cloud computing partner, Microsoft, forcing the ChatGPT maker to turn to its competitors in the cloud market.
On the AI products front, Google seems to be doing better than initially expected. The company said its AI chatbot, Gemini, now reaches 450 million monthly active users, and AI Overviews reaches 2 billion monthly active users. However, the business around these products remains unclear, as does the share of queries they’re taking from Google Search.
It’s hard to imagine that Pichai is truly that excited about working with OpenAI, a company that represents the biggest threat Google Search has ever faced. The partnership is reminiscent of Google’s deal with Yahoo from decades ago, when it was just a startup, and used Yahoo’s homepage as an accelerant to overtake it as the front door to the internet. How lasting OpenAI’s relationship with Google is remains to be seen.