The $100 billion partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI, announced Monday, represents – for now – the latest mega-deal reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape. The agreement involves non-voting shares tied to massive chip purchases and enough computing power for more than 5 million U.S. households, deepening the relationship between two of AI’s most powerful players.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud is placing a different bet entirely. While the industry’s biggest players cement ever-tighter partnerships, Google Cloud is hellbent on capturing the next generation of AI companies before they become too big to court.
Francis deSouza, its COO, has seen the AI revolution from multiple vantage points. As the former CEO of genomics giant Illumina, he watched machine learning transform drug discovery. As co-founder of a two-year-old AI alignment startup, Synth Labs, he has grappled with the safety challenges of increasingly powerful models. Now, having joined the C-suite at Google Cloud in January, he’s orchestrating a massive wager on AI’s second wave.
It’s a story deSouza likes to tell in numbers. In a conversation with this editor, he notes several times that nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all gen AI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate.
Asked what percentage of Google Cloud’s revenue comes from AI companies, he offers instead that “AI is resetting the cloud market, and Google Cloud is leading the way, especially with startups.”
The Nvidia-OpenAI deal exemplifies the scale of consolidation sweeping AI infrastructure. Microsoft’s original $1 billion OpenAI investment has grown to nearly $14 billion. Amazon followed with $8 billion in Anthropic investments, securing deep hardware customizations that essentially tailor AI training to work better with Amazon’s infrastructure. Oracle has emerged as a surprise winner, too, landing a $30 billion cloud deal with OpenAI and then securing a jaw-dropping $300 billion five-year commitment starting in 2027.
Even Meta, despite building its own infrastructure, signed a $10 billion deal with Google Cloud while planning $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure spending through 2028. The Trump administration’s $500 billion “Stargate” project, involving SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle, adds another layer to these interlocking partnerships.
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These gigantic deals might seem threatening for Google, given the partnerships that companies like OpenAI and Nvidia appear to be cementing elsewhere. In fact, it looks a lot like Google is being cut out of some frenzied dealmaking.
The Google logo appears during a meeting between Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Image Credits:Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto / Getty Images
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