All posts tagged: google cloud

Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off

Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off

Published by skeptic

Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong. On stage with TechCrunch: Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML, the Dutch company that holds a monopoly on the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which modern chips would not exist; Francis deSouza, COO of Google Cloud, who is overseeing one of the biggest infrastructure bets in corporate history; Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a $15 billion physical AI company that started in simulation and has since moved into defense; Dimitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer of Perplexity, the AI-native search-to-agents company; and Eve Bodnia, a quantum physicist who left academia to challenge the foundational architecture most of the AI industry takes for granted at her startup, Logical Intelligence. (Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Yan LeCun, signed on as founding chair of …

Google Cloud surpasses B but says growth was capacity-constrained

Google Cloud surpasses $20B but says growth was capacity-constrained

Published by skeptic

Google Cloud, the business under parent company Alphabet that provides enterprise AI solutions, had a blowout first quarter, with revenues topping $20 billion for the time, a 63% increase from the same period last year. However, investors were concerned about the constraints surrounding the business and how Google decides to allocate cloud capacity. In the first quarter of 2026, the company said its cloud growth was driven by strong performance in the Google Cloud Platform, which grew at a higher rate than the Google Cloud division’s overall revenue growth. (The Cloud division includes a variety of services like infrastructure, data analytics, AI/ML tools, and Google Workspace.) Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts on the Q1 2026 earnings call on Wednesday that this growth came from “strong demand” for Gemini Enterprise and its AI solutions, and pointed to an increased demand for infrastructure, including TPU hardware and data centers. AI solutions were the largest driver of cloud growth, with products built on Google’s generative AI models growing nearly 800% year-over-year. Google Gemini Enterprise also grew 40% …

Google VP warns that two types of AI startups may not survive

Google VP warns that two types of AI startups may not survive

Published by skeptic

The generative AI boom minted a startup a minute. But as the dust starts to settle, two once-hot business models are looking more like cautionary tales: LLM wrappers and AI aggregators.  Darren Mowry, who leads Google’s global startup organization across Cloud, DeepMind, and Alphabet, says startups with these hooks have their “check engine light” on. LLM wrappers are essentially startups that wrap existing large language models, like Claude, GPT, or Gemini, with a product or UX layer to solve a specific problem. An example would be a startup that uses AI to helps students study. “If you’re really just counting on the back end model to do all the work and you’re almost white-labeling that model, the industry doesn’t have a lot of patience for that anymore,” Mowry said on this week’s episode of Equity.  Wrapping “very thin intellectual property wrapped around Gemini or GPT-5” signals you’re not differentiating yourself, Mowry says.  “You’ve got to have deep, wide moats that are either horizontally differentiated or something really specific to a vertical market” for a startup …

Is your startup’s check engine light on? Google Cloud’s VP explains what to do

Is your startup’s check engine light on? Google Cloud’s VP explains what to do

Published by skeptic

Startup founders are being pushed to move faster than ever, using AI while facing tighter funding, rising infrastructure costs, and more pressure to show real traction early. Cloud credits, access to GPUs, and foundation models have made it easier to get started, but those early infrastructure choices can have unforeseen consequences once startups move beyond free credits and into real cloud bills.  On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Darren Mowry, Google Cloud’s vice president of global startups who is right at the center of those tradeoffs. Watch as they discuss what Mowry’s seeing across the startup ecosystem, how Google Cloud is competing for AI startups, and what founders should be thinking about as they scale.  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Source link