Subject: Need More Compute
'At an all-hands meeting on Nov. 6, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation, viewed by CNBC, titled “AI Infrastructure,” which included a slide on “AI compute demand.” The slide said, “Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years.

“The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Vahdat said at the meeting, where Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi also took questions from employees.”

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Pichai told employees at the meeting that 2026 will be “intense,” citing AI competition and the pressure to meet cloud and compute demand.

He also answered a question about a potential AI bubble, a topic that’s gained resonance across Silicon Valley and Wall Street of late as investors have grown skeptical about whether the trillions of dollars in anticipated spend in the coming years is justified.

The employee question that he read aloud asked, “Amid significant Al investments and market talk of a potential Al bubble burst, how are we thinking about ensuring long-term sustainability and profitability if the Al market doesn’t mature as expected?”

Pichai acknowledged the concerns.

“It’s a great question. It’s been definitely in the zeitgeist, people are talking about it,” Pichai said.

He then reiterated a point he’s made in the past about the risks of not investing aggressively enough, and highlighted Google’s cloud business, which just recorded 34% annual revenue growth to more than $15 billion in the quarter. Its backlog reached $155 billion.

“I think it’s always difficult during these moments because the risk of underinvesting is pretty high,” Pichai said. “I actually think for how extraordinary the cloud numbers were, those numbers would have been much better if we had more compute.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/2...