AI talent wars: Google ‘competitive on all fronts,’ will keep investing in people and compute, says Sundar Pichai

Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Google parent Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said on July 23 that the tech giant has an "extraordinary breadth and depth of talent" and continues to invest in people as well as resources to ensure it is well-positioned to capture the opportunities offered by artificial intelligence (AI).

The remarks come amid a fierce AI talent war, as tech giants compete to attract and retain top researchers, engineers and developers to dominate the rapidly evolving sector.

This competition has also given rise to so-called "hackquisitions", where a tech giant hires the founders and top talent from fast-growing AI startups and licences their IP, without formally acquiring the company, thereby avoiding regulatory scrutiny.

Earlier this month, Google struck a similar deal with AI coding startup Windsurf for $2.4 billion, hiring founder Varun Mohan and other senior employees and securing a nonexclusive licence to certain technologies. The move came shortly after an acquisition deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI fell through.

In 2024, the company rehired AI pioneer Noam Shazeer, co-founder of the chatbot startup Character.AI, in a reported $2.7 billion deal that also included Google licensing the company’s technology.

Several prominent executives and researchers from Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research unit, have also left to join rivals such as Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has been actively courting top AI talent for the company's new superintelligence lab, doling out compensation packages of up to nine figures.

During the earnings call on July 23, Pichai said the company has always "deeply invested" in talent, including AI talent for over a decade.

"In my experience, the top people look for a combination of things. They want to be at the frontier, driving progress, so the mission and how state-of-the-art your work is really matters. Access to compute resources and access to peers, working with the best people in the industry [are just as important]...I think we are pretty competitive on all of those fronts," Pichai said.

The Alphabet chief emphasised that both the company's retention metrics and its rate of incoming talent are healthy. "I do know individual cases can make headlines but when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing very well through this moment," he said.

Alphabet chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi said the tech giant expects headcount to grow in key investment areas in 2025. The firm had 187,103 employees at the end of Q2 2025.

The company has also raised its capital spending forecast for 2025 to $85 billion from $75 billion. This increase in investment follows "strong and growing demand" for its cloud products and services whose annual revenue run-rate is now more than $50 billion, Pichai said.

Capital spending is expected to rise further in 2026 due to customer demand for its cloud services and broader growth opportunities, Ashkenazi said.

Alphabet reported a 14 percent increase in revenue at $96.4 billion in the June quarter, while net income rose 19 percent to $28.2 billion.

The growth was driven by a 32 percent jump in cloud revenue at $13.6 billion and double-digit growth in its advertising business, which brought in $71.4 billion. Google Services, which includes company's advertising, subscription, and device businesses, saw a 12 percent revenue increase at $82.5 billion.