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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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Waymo to begin testing at San Jose airport this fall

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Waymo to begin testing at San Jose airport this fall

Waymo partners with Uber to bring robotaxi service to Atlanta and Austin.

Uber Technologies Inc.

Alphabet’s Waymo unit will begin test-driving robotaxis at its first California-based airport, the company said Thursday.

The autonomous car unit has been cleared to begin testing driverless rides at the San José Mineta International Airport in San Jose, California, this fall. Waymo said it plans to offer paid rides at the airport later this year.

“With San José at the epicenter of the biggest sporting events of 2026, Waymo is an ideal mode of transportation that will help visitors move around the area smoothly and safely,” San José Mayor Matt Mahan said in a release.

The vehicles will pick up passengers at the Ground Transportation Centers in Terminal A or B and roll out to locations in Waymo’s San Francisco Bay Area service area, according to the release.

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Once fully operational, it will be the second international airport where the company has service.

In 2023, Waymo launched at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which has become the most popular Waymo destination in its Phoenix metropolitan service area, a Waymo spokesperson said Thursday.

Waymo has continued to expand its driverless, ride-hailing service across the U.S. after already launching commercial operations in Austin, Texas, as well as Atlanta, San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

In March, Waymo expanded its service to include an additional 27 square miles of coverage around the San Francisco Bay Area, including Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Jose.

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Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s Sierra is the latest $10 billion AI startup

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Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor's Sierra is the latest  billion AI startup

Bret Taylor, chairman of the board of directors of OpenAI, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 8, 2025.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

Bret Taylor’s artificial intelligence startup Sierra has just joined an exclusive club: The company sports a new $10 billion valuation after raising $350 million in fresh capital.

Sierra is one of just a handful of AI startups, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines that are valued at or above $10 billion.

Investors are pouring money into this competitive group of companies in the hopes that they’ll eventually hit the public markets.

Taylor is the chairman of OpenAI’s board, and previously served as co-CEO of Salesforce alongside Marc Benioff. Taylor co-founded Sierra in 2023. The company builds and implements AI agents for customer service. AI agents can carry out tasks autonomously on behalf of their users.

Shares of Salesforce fell 5% Thursday after the company reported weak guidance and concerns lingered about how AI is affecting software companies.

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Sierra said its agents are already being used by “hundreds of millions of people” to help with tasks like refinancing homes, ordering lunch, delivering furniture, understanding insurance deductibles and fixing technology, among other things.

Greenoaks led Sierra’s latest funding round, the company said. Its valuation more than doubled from its most recent raise in October.

“We’re in this for the long term,” Sierra said in a blog post on Thursday.

The company said it will use its fresh funding to invest in its platform and focus on domestic and international expansion.

Sierra’s funding follows a flurry of other major AI raises in Silicon Valley. Earlier this week, Anthropic announced it had closed a $13 billion funding round at a $183 billion post-money valuation.

WATCH: Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor on AI agents’ role in an evolving global landscape

Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor on AI agents' role in an evolving global landscape

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Broadcom earnings primer: AI chip demand and growth are key

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Broadcom earnings primer: AI chip demand and growth are key

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.

Lucas Jackson | Reuters

Broadcom is scheduled to report earnings for its fiscal third quarter after the close of regular trading on Thursday.

Here’s what analysts are expecting, according to a consensus from LSEG.

  • Earnings per share: $1.65
  • Revenue: $15.83 billion

Broadcom, which develops custom chips for Google and other huge cloud companies and also makes networking gear needed to tie thousands of artificial intelligence chips together, is expected to report revenue growth of 21% from $13.07 billion a year ago.

Analysts project revenue growth will hold steady the rest of this year and accelerate a bit in 2026.

Broadcom has been one of the chief beneficiaries of the AI boom thanks largely to its accelerator chips, which the company calls XPUs. The processors are generally simpler and less expensive to operate than Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, and they’re designed to run specific AI programs efficiently.

Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald wrote in a report last week that they expect to see increased signs of demand from Google and Meta.

“Additionally, all eyes will turn towards any visibility of current AI Custom Silicon engagements converting into customers with high-volume ramps in sight,” wrote the analysts, who recommend buying the stock.

The analysts estimate that custom silicon could generate $25 billion to $30 billion in revenue for Broadcom next year and more than $40 billion by around 2027. The company generated total revenue of $51.6 billion in the latest fiscal year.

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Shares of Broadcom are up 30% this year and have almost doubled in the past 12 months, lifting the company’s market cap to $1.4 trillion.

In the fiscal second quarter, AI revenue jumped 46% from a year earlier to more than $4.4 billion, with 40% from networking. CEO Hock Tan said that number should reach $5.1 billion in the third quarter, “as our hyperscale partners continue to invest.”

Some of Broadcom’s expansion has been fueled by acquisitions, most notably the purchase of server virtualization software vendor VMware for $61 billion in 2023. VMware is key to Broadcom’s infrastructure software business, which accounted for 44% of sales in the most recent quarter.

WATCH: Nvidia has best percentage of revenue from AI

Nvidia will be the ‘best beneficiary’ of AI spending, says Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore

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