Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 'AI shift' opens opportunities to invest in startups

In this article GOOG Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images With Alphabet poised to earn potentially $100 billion or more from its 2015 bet on Elon Musk's SpaceX, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the explosion of artificial intelligence has opened the door to more startup investments. "You know SpaceX, Anthropic and so on so, I think now with the AI shift, there are more opportunities on which we can deploy capital in a good way and so we are doing that," Pichai said, in a conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison posted on Tuesday. Google has long been in the startup investing game through its early-stage venture group GV and its growth arm CapitalG. But with today's AI companies requiring checks in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Google parent Alphabet is joining other tech giants like Nvidia , Microsoft and Amazon in skirting the venture route and going big off the balance sheet. Alphabet first invested in SpaceX in 2015, putting in $900 million at a valuation of about $12 billion. In February, SpaceX merged with Musk's xAI in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion. Assuming Alphabet has held onto all of its shares, its stake would now be worth around $100 billion, and could go up in the coming months. Last week, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO , and the company is reportedly seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion in what would be a record offering. Then there's OpenAI rival Anthropic, which competes with Google at the AI model layer but also partners with the search company by committing to purchase billions of dollars worth of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, and cloud infrastructure. In 2023, Google invested $300 million in the AI lab for a stake of about 10%. Months later, it poured in another $2 billion . Since then, Anthropic...