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Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, right, arrives on stage as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai exits during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco on April 9, 2019.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

When Google hired Oracle’s Thomas Kurian four years ago to run its cloud business, the internet search company had a clear reason for putting its trust in a career enterprise software executive.

Google was a consumer company. Despite years spent trying to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in selling cloud-based storage, computing and other services to big corporations, it was coming up short in its effort to win marquee deals.

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While Google is still third in the U.S. cloud infrastructure market, its business is growing rapidly and, as of the first quarter, is finally contributing positively to Alphabet’s bottom line. Earlier this week, Alphabet said Google’s cloud unit generated $191 million in operating profit, after losing a total of $4 billion in 2021 and 2022. Revenue jumped 28% from a year earlier to $7.45 billion, far outpacing Google’s struggling ad business.

“We were not in a very good situation when I joined,” Kurian told CNBC in an interview after the results were released. “I think we were very early in the business. Most enterprises did not take us as a viable partner.”

The central problem wasn’t hard to spot. Google was a company of software developers and data scientists, who were trained at building sophisticated technologies. But they had no real idea how to build, market and sell them to the business world. Under Kurian’s predecessor, VMware co-founder Diane Greene, critics said Google’s cloud business hadn’t matured enough to handle enterprises even as it was investing heavily to do so.

The cloud division includes the Google Cloud Platform, which competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and the Google Workspace productivity software bundle that goes head-to-head with Microsoft Office.

Kurian said he spent a lot of time with the technology in his early days to see how it worked and where it needed improvement. From 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., he would read technical design documents. In the evenings, he played with the products.

“We shifted the organization from thinking, we’re building technology to we’re building products and solutions,” Kurian said.

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It’s a market Google has been committed to winning for years, as corporations have been rapidly pushing workloads from their own data centers to the cloud. Google wants to not only capture that storage and computing business but also get developers from those companies and others to use its cutting-edge technology, particularly as artificial intelligence systems gain traction.

The expansion has been costly. Almost every quarter, from the beginning of 2017 through the third period of 2020, finance chief Ruth Porat told analysts that cloud had been the biggest area of head count increases, for both sales and technical roles. Google also grew the operation through acquisitions, buying data analytics software startup Looker for $2.4 billion in 2019 and security software vendor Mandiant for $6.1 billion last year.

The cloud unit now accounts for more than 25% of Alphabet’s full-time workforce, CNBC reported earlier this year.

Kurian’s focus has included developing product road maps, introducing new pricing models, bolstering customer service and becoming more efficient with its infrastructure, a key to saving money.

“We’ve reduced cycle time in the way we provision and deploy machines by a factor of five in the last four years,” Kurian said. “There’s 100 different projects that have gone on to optimize resource consumption.”

Customer success is a practice that’s been widely adopted in the enterprise software world as a way to keep clients happy and wanting to buy more, emphasizing retention and limiting churn.

Google built up its customer-success mode to work more tightly with clients, and it racked up a community of 100,000 partners. The company has had hundreds of its senior engineers sponsor important customers so they could see how their products are being used and understand what needs to be changed.

“We have awards twice a year for teams that have done the best job helping customers,” Kurian said, adding that Google now ranks among the top five enterprise software sellers.

In 2020, Google brought its productivity tools under the brand Google Workspace. It also issued new pricing tiers, resulting in organizations of different sizes starting to pay different prices.

While Google’s cloud unit has swung to posting a profit, there’s some fuzziness in the numbers.

Last week, Alphabet restated operating income for cloud and its other segments, resulting in lower cloud losses in 2021 and 2022. The restated numbers show the cloud unit had a $186 million operating loss in the fourth quarter, compared with $480 million before the change, for example.

The cloud numbers also benefited from an extension of the useful life of data center equipment. But Kurian said competitors have made similar depreciation adjustments.

“We were always going to get to profitability,” he said. “If you draw the line, you can see the curve.”

‘Enterprise discipline’

Under Kurian’s leadership, Google’s cloud group has had to cope with its share of executive turnover. Javier Soltero, who was the head of Workspace, left in July. Rob Enslin, a former top SAP executive who joined Google as president of global customer operations in 2019, departed last year to become co-CEO of UiPath. And Kirsten Kliphouse, who was the cloud group’s president of Americas, left in 2023 after four years at the company.

But head count has continued to grow, as has the company’s roster of large customers. In the past three years, Google has signed deals with Coinbase, Deutsche Bank, Ford, General Mills and SpaceX.

And existing clients have gone deeper with Google.

Home Depot said it was adopting Google’s public cloud in 2016, while Greene was CEO. Fahim Siddiqui, Home Depot’s chief information officer, said the home-improvement retailer has found increasing value from Google’s platform since he joined from Staples in late 2018.

“He’s brought in the enterprise discipline,” Siddiqui said of Kurian. “It’s one thing to provide the capability of the cloud, a set of interesting technical capabilities. There’s a discipline of availability, reliability, management and being a proven partner on this journey.”

Siddiqui said Home Depot uses its own data centers and co-location facilities, as well as cloud services from Google and Microsoft. Google is the company’s main cloud-computing partner, he said, and last year Home Depot started moving merchandising applications to Google’s cloud.

A big partner move Kurian made in his early months as CEO involved what he called an “integrated open-source ecosystem.” It was an alliance with Elastic, MongoDB and five other companies that sell distributions of open source software.

Elastic and MongoDB shares rallied as Kurian, speaking at Google’s Next cloud conference, talked about how clients could receive a single bill while using products from other companies managed through Google’s cloud console.

“It was music to my ears,” said Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, which sells cloud database software and services. At the time, AWS was attempting to add some open source MongoDB database software capabilities into its DocumentDB service.

Ittycheria said the open source initiative was Kurian’s idea, and he applauded how Google has arranged the partnerships. In 2021, Google said it was lowering the percentage of revenue it keeps in marketplace deals to 3% from 20%. Ittycheria said MongoDB is “very happy with the structure of the deal.”

Jeffrey Flaks, the CEO of Hartford HealthCare, which has 37,000 employees, said one reason why his Connecticut health system moved to Google Cloud Platform last year from its on-premises data centers is that other large hospitals had picked Google. He said Kurian was another factor in why it selected Google over AWS, Azure and Oracle’s cloud.

“His personal engagement, his knowledge of our intentions and our desires and, candidly, his personal problem-solving skills,” Flaks said, “distinguished Google Cloud in this process.”

Google Cloud technology chief Will Grannis said Kurian’s commitment to improving the division’s offerings was evident right away. Grannis recalled a day in late 2018, after Kurian had been picked for the role but before he’d actually started the job.

Kurian stopped by a Google office in Sunnyvale, California, and was introduced to employees. After the meeting, Grannis found himself alone in the elevator with Kurian and they rode down silently. As they walked toward the parking lot, Grannis, who was then a managing director, introduced himself, and they began talking about a container-management technology called Kubernetes.

“I’ve been trying to get some Kubernetes clusters spun up in the console, and I have some feedback,” Kurian said, according to Grannis. “I’d like to understand how we can improve the experience for developers.”

The conversation went on for an hour.

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Nvidia’s new ‘robot brain’ goes on sale for $3,499 as company targets robotics for growth

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Nvidia's new 'robot brain' goes on sale for ,499 as company targets robotics for growth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia announced Monday that its latest robotics chip module, the Jetson AGX Thor, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.

The company calls the chip a “robot brain.” The first kits ship next month, Nvidia said last week, and the chips will allow customers to create robots.

After a company uses the developer kit to prototype their robot, Nvidia will sell Thor T5000 modules that can be installed in production-ready robots. If a company needs more than 1,000 Thor chips, Nvidia will charge $2,999 per module.

CEO Jensen Huang has said robotics is the company’s largest growth opportunity outside of artificial intelligence, which has led to the Nvidia’s overall sales more than tripling in the past two years.

“We do not build robots, we do not build cars, but we enable the whole industry with our infrastructure computers and the associated software,” said Deepu Talla, Nvidia’s vice president of robotics and edge AI, on a call with reporters Friday.

The Jetson Thor chips are based on a Blackwell graphics processor, which is Nvidia’s current generation of technology used in its AI chips, as well as its chips for computer games.

Nvidia said that its Jetson Thor chips are 7.5 times faster than its previous generation. That allows them to run generative AI models, including large language models and visual models that can interpret the world around them, which is essential for humanoid robots, Nvidia said. The Jetson Thor chips are equipped with 128GB of memory, which is essential for big AI models.

Companies including Agility Robotics, Amazon, Meta and Boston Dynamics are using its Jetson chips, Nvidia said. Nvidia has also invested in robotics companies such as Field AI.

However, robotics remains a small business for Nvidia, accounting for about 1% of the company’s total revenue, despite the fact that it has launched several new robot chips since 2014. But it’s growing fast.

Nvidia recently combined its business units to group its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. That unit reported $567 million in quarterly sales in May, which represented a 72% increase on an annual basis.

The company said its Jetson Thor chips can be used for self-driving cars as well, especially from Chinese brands. Nvidia calls its car chips Drive AGX, and while they are similar to its robotics chips, they run an operating system called Drive OS that’s been tuned for automotive purposes.

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Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

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Intel says Trump deal has risks for shareholders, international sales

Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan speaks at the company’s Annual Manufacturing Technology Conference in San Jose, California, U.S. April 29, 2025.

Laure Andrillon | Reuters

Intel on Monday warned of “adverse reactions” from investors, employees and others to the Trump administration taking a 10% stake in the company, in a filing citing risks involved with the deal.

A key concern area is international sales, with 76% of Intel’s revenue in its last fiscal year coming from outside the U.S., according to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company had $53.1 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2024, down 2% from the year prior.

For Intel’s international customers, the company is now directly tied to President Donald Trump‘s ever-shifting tariff and trade policies.

“There could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments or competitors,” the company wrote in the filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”

Intel also said that the potential for a changing political landscape in Washington could challenge or void the deal and create risks to current and future shareholders.

The deal, which was announced Friday, gives the Department of Commerce up to 433.3 million shares of the company, which is dilutive to existing shareholders. The purchase of shares is being funded largely by money already awarded to Intel under President Joe Biden‘s CHIPS Act.

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Intel has already received $2.2 billion from the program and is set for another $5.7 billion. A separate federal program awarded $3.2 billion, for a total of $11.1 billion, according to a release.

Trump called the agreement “a great Deal for America” and said the building of advanced chips “is fundamental to the future of our Nation.” 

Shares of Intel rallied as momentum built toward a deal in August, with the stock up about 25%.

The agreement requires the government to vote with Intel’s board of directors. In the Monday filing, the company noted that the government stake “reduces the voting and other governance rights of stockholders and may limit potential future transactions that may be beneficial to stockholders.”

Furthermore, the company acknowledged in the filing that it has not completed an analysis of all “financial, tax and accounting implications.”

Intel’s tumultuous fiscal year 2024 included the exit of CEO Pat Gelsinger in December after a four-year tenure during which the stock price tanked and the company lost ground to rivals in the artificial intelligence boom.

CEO Lip-Bu Tan took the helm in March.

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Nvidia faces Wall Street’s high expectations two years into AI boom

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Nvidia faces Wall Street's high expectations two years into AI boom

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends the “Winning the AI Race” Summit in Washington D.C., U.S., July 23, 2025.

Kent Nishimura | Reuters

It’s been two years since the explosion of generative artificial intelligence started to transform Nvidia’s business. Since then, the chipmaker’s revenue has more than tripled and profits have quadrupled.

Nvidia‘s fiscal second-quarter earnings report, scheduled for Wednesday, will mark the second anniversary of growth, as the company shifted from being known as a maker of gaming chips to its current position at the heart of the technology industry.

Last month, Nvidia became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap, and it’s continued to appreciate in value. Since the end of 2022, around the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT and sparked the generative AI boom, Nvidia’s stock price is up twelvefold. It’s up 33% this year, closing on Friday at $177.99.

Growth is still substantial for a company Nvidia’s size, but it has slowed dramatically. After five straight quarters of triple-digit expansion in 2023 and 2024, revenue growth dipped to 69% in the fiscal first quarter this year. Nvidia is expected to report a year-over-year jump of 53% to $45.9 billion in its second-quarter report, according to LSEG’s consensus of analyst estimates.

Data center revenue in the first quarter accounted for 88% of Nvidia’s total sales, the clearest sign of how significant AI has become to its business. The company said that 34% of total sales last year came from three unnamed customers. Analysts say Nvidia’s top end users are major internet companies and cloud providers such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

“The assumptions and performance of Nvidia really dictates what the market is going to start to price into the AI trade, and that whole AI trade has essentially been driving the market this past year,” said Melissa Otto, head of Visible Alpha Research at S&P Global, which aggregates Wall Street research.

Nvidia makes up about 7.5% of the S&P 500.

Tech’s megacap companies, other than Nvidia, reported quarterly results in late July, updating Wall Street on their investment plans. In all, they’re looking to spend roughly $320 billion on AI technology and data center buildouts this year.

OpenAI, which is still private but has a valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars, says it will team up with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion over the next four years on the Stargate project, which President Donald Trump announced in January.

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, displays the new Blackwell GPU chip during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on March 18, 2024.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Analysts say about half of AI capital spending ends up with Nvidia. The company’s reliance on the so-called hyperscalers leaves it vulnerable to changes in the macroeconomic environment and in the artificial intelligence industry, which remains hard to predict.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last week that he believes “investors as a whole are overexcited about AI,” and even said it could be a “bubble.”

But don’t expect a pullback yet. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC on Wednesday that the company “constantly” doesn’t have enough computing power.

As always, Wall Street will be paying close attention to Nvidia’s guidance and other forward-looking commentary from CEO Jensen Huang. For the fiscal third quarter, analysts are expecting revenue growth of 50% to $52.7 billion, according to LSEG. If Nvidia guides higher and tops estimates for the second quarter, analysts say that kind of “beat and raise” could drive AI optimism even higher.

Blackwell ramp

One visible sign of Nvidia’s rise is Huang’s worldwide fame. He’s regularly name-checked by Trump and during the quarter traveled to meet with business leaders and officials in Taiwan, China, Germany, England and Saudi Arabia.

Huang recently struck a deal with Trump to regain access to the Chinese market. Nvidia will pay 15% of its China chip revenue to the U.S. government in exchange for licenses to export its China-focused AI chip called the H20, Trump said this month. The president added that he’d asked for 20%, but Huang bargained him down.

The H20 is worth a lot to Nvidia. The chip would have contributed about $8 billion in sales in the second quarter, Nvidia said in May, before the U.S. government said it would require a license to ship it to China, effectively shutting off sales.

Nvidia did not include any H20 sales in its guidance for the second quarter, and analysts doubt that it will include any in its forecast for the current period, partially because the Chinese government is pressuring its cloud providers to use homegrown chips from companies such as Huawei.

If H20 is included in guidance, it could boost revenue expectations by about $2 billion to $3 billion, according to analysts at KeyBanc, who recommend buying the stock. But they said they expect Nvidia to completely exclude it, following Advanced Micro Devices’ lead from early August.

“Additionally, given a potential 15% tax on AI exports and pressure from the China government for its AI providers to use domestic AI chips, we expect management to guide conservatively,” the KeyBanc analysts wrote.

Nvidia is working on a new China AI chip based on Blackwell that would also likely need the president’s approval.

“I’m sure he’s pitching the president all the time,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said about Huang last week on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” 

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