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Thomas Kurian, CEO of Alphabet’s Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco on April 9, 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

As a part of a recent reorganization within Google Cloud, CEO Thomas Kurian sidelined multiple tenured company veterans — one way he’s is living up to the company’s big expectations when it hired him two years ago.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Kurian, in a recent email to staff, announced a broad reorganization within Google Cloud’s engineering units. The shakeup is meant to help Google Cloud continue to grow its market share while streamlining an organization that has ballooned since Kurian took over. The technical unit alone has doubled since he joined, Kurian said in his recent email.

Google still lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in market share, but the recent reorganization and steady gains show why Kurian, an initially unlikely candidate, is doing what Google had hoped.

In the latest re-org, Kurian sidelined several veterans who otherwise may have stayed on board thanks to their tenure. There’s a joke among Google employees that longtime middle managers and executives can sit comfortably in their positions for as long as they want despite changing business needs, thanks to the cultural bureaucracy. But in this latest move, Kurian showed he isn’t afraid to bench veterans and give others more responsibility.

Kurian removed Eyal Manor, who has been at the company more than 14 years and worked within Cloud for five years. Manor oversaw the app management service Anthos, which Google hopes will give it an edge against rivals. Manor will look for other areas inside the company to work, Kurian said. Google spokesperson Jacinda Mein said that Manor chose to leave the group, and that the timing coincided with this reorg.

The reorg also effectively sidelines Urs Holzle, who was one of Google’s first ten employees and first vice president of engineering, removing him from some of his day-to-day responsibilities in favor of a more strategic role. Holzle recently faced backlash from employees for contradicting his own remote work policies, too.

Kurian also moved to unify Google Cloud’s technical teams under Brad Calder, who will take on some of Manor’s and Holzle’s responsibilities and report directly to Kurian. Calder spent eight years at Microsoft before joining Google Cloud in 2015.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer at Google LLC, speaks during the Google Cloud Next ’19 event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, April 9, 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Growth trumps culture, for now

While Google Cloud still isn’t profitable, Kurian has more than doubled revenue and slashed losses from when he first joined the company, earning praise from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, CFO Ruth Porat and investors.

In the most recent quarter, cloud revenue grew to $4.63 billion, up nearly 54% from $3.01 billion a year ago. The cloud business had operating losses of $591 million, a dramatic 58.7% improvement from last year’s loss of $1.43 billion.

Kurian has also put a strong focus on the company’s sales organization. Prior to Kurian, 10 managers would have to provide approval before a salesperson could offer a discount to a customer, and the deal would then require non-disclosure agreements and a team of lawyers. Kurian streamlined some of those practices early on.

He has also encouraged the sales teams to incorporate other Google products, such as artificial intelligence tools and the Android mobile operating system, into their pitches in attempts to compete for more customers, especially more noteworthy ones. Kurian also reportedly boosted salespeople’s salaries to be more competitive than Amazon and Microsoft. 

Kurian had a reputation for a no-frills, at-times militant leadership style at Oracle. When Google hired him in 2018, it came as a shock because he was the least “Google-y” person to be a leader at the company, where employees largely felt they had a voice and everything was working toward a greater good.

Culturally, Kurian is still trying to figure out how to navigate that longstanding justice-motivated employee culture, but he isn’t completely writing it off, as some internally expected. Most recently, he claimed to seek information from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol about how the company’s artificial intelligence cloud tools would be used amid employee concern. While, there’s still a contingent of employees upset with the prospects, Kurian hasn’t completely written those concerns off yet.

But culture fit is not why Google hired him. They knew his reputation. Google’s culture more generally had already begun moving toward a culture that no longer shied away from military contracts or used slogans like “Don’t Be Evil.”

Whether or not Kurian’s process works in the long run, growth is what Google wants and growth is what what it’s getting — for now, at least.

Watch Now: Google Cloud is reorganizing its engineering units

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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

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December 13, 2025

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Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

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Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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December 12, 2025

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Oracle says there have been 'no delays' in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.

Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.

The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.

“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”

The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.

“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.

Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.

In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.

Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”

But no announcement has come yet.

In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”

OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.

On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.

“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”

OpenAI declined to comment.

WATCH: Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

Oracle says there have been 'no delays' in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

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December 12, 2025

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AI order from Trump might be ‘illegal,’ Democrats and consumer advocacy groups claim

“This is the wrong approach — and most likely illegal,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in a post on X Thursday.

“We need a strong federal safety standard, but we should not remove the few protections Americans currently have from the downsides of AI,” Klobuchar said.

Trump’s executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a task force to challenge state laws regulating AI.

The Commerce Department was also directed to identify “onerous” state regulations aimed at AI.

The order is a win for tech companies such as OpenAI and Google and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which have all lobbied against state regulations they view as burdensome. 

It follows a push by some Republicans in Congress to impose a moratorium on state AI laws. A recent plan to tack on that moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act was scuttled.

Collin McCune, head of government affairs at Andreessen Horowitz, celebrated Trump’s order, calling it “an important first step” to boost American competition and innovation. But McCune urged Congress to codify a national AI framework.

“States have an important role in addressing harms and protecting people, but they can’t provide the long-term clarity or national direction that only Congress can deliver,” McCune said in a statement.

Sriram Krishnan, a White House AI advisor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, during an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said that Trump is was looking to partner with Congress to pass such legislation.

“The White House is now taking a firm stance where we want to push back on ‘doomer’ laws that exist in a bunch of states around the country,” Krishnan said.

He also said that the goal of the executive order is to give the White House tools to go after state laws that it believes make America less competitive, such as recently passed legislation in Democratic-led states like California and Colorado.

The White House will not use the executive order to target state laws that protect the safety of children, Krishnan said.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Trump’s order “mostly bluster” and said the president “cannot unilaterally preempt state law.”

“We expect the EO to be challenged in court and defeated,” Weissman said in a statement. “In the meantime, states should continue their efforts to protect their residents from the mounting dangers of unregulated AI.”

Weissman said about the order, “This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior
by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate.”

In the short term, the order could affect a handful of states that have already passed legislation targeting AI. The order says that states whose laws are considered onerous could lose federal funding.

One Colorado law, set to take effect in June, will require AI developers to protect consumers from reasonably foreseeable risks of algorithmic discrimination.

Some say Trump’s order will have no real impact on that law or other state regulations.

“I’m pretty much ignoring it, because an executive order cannot tell a state what to do,” said Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat who co-sponsored the anti-discrimination law.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law that, starting in January, will require major AI companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols. 

That law’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said that Trump’s stated goal of having the United States dominate the AI sector is undercut by his recent moves. 

“Of course, he just authorized chip sales to China & Saudi Arabia: the exact opposite of ensuring U.S. dominance,” Wiener wrote in an X post on Thursday night. The Bay Area Democrat is seeking to succeed Speaker-emerita Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Trump on Monday said he will Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to “approved customers” in China, provided that U.S. gets a 25% cut of revenues.

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