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Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet Inc., speaks during a news conference at Michigan Central Station in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, Feb. 4, 2022.

Jeff Kowalsky | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A string of Google executives have changed their roles in the span of several months, in a shift that has sidelined many of company’s remaining old guard.

The changes encompass high-profile executives such as finance chief Ruth Porat, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and employee No. 8, Urs Hölzle, among others. Some say they have left their roles for a new challenge and others have left to seek opportunities in artificial intelligence.

In February, Wojcicki — one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley — announced that she was stepping back after nine years at the helm of the Google-owned platform that grew to be the world’s most popular video service. She had been at Google for more than 25 years, after famously lending her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to use as their first office.

While she’ll still be in an advisory role at Google, she said she wanted to “start a new chapter.”

Wojcicki wasn’t the only executive to leave YouTube. Robert Kyncl, the chief business officer for 12 years, stepped away to become CEO of Warner Music Group at the beginning of the year. 

In March, CapitalG founder and longtime Google employee David Lawee stepped down from his role after 17 years at Alphabet, saying he wanted to explore new areas of interest and spend more time with his family.

Hölzle, who has long overseen Google’s technical infrastructure and was its eighth employee, said he would be stepping back from management after 24 years of leading technical teams, CNBC reported in July. Hölzle will be classified as an “individual contributor,” which means he will be working independently and no longer managing employees. 

Also in July, Porat announced that she will step down as Alphabet‘s chief financial officer after eight years and take a new role as president and chief investment officer. When asked about the timing of the move, Porat, who was previously Morgan Stanley‘s CFO, said she wanted to take on a different set of challenges.

Porat will also be engaged with policymakers to “recognize the importance of technology” and on issues including employment, economic, competitiveness and infrastructure expansion,” the company said.

“We have a steady and experienced leadership team, many of whom have been with the company for well over a decade, ” said Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini in statement about the shifts. “We also have a strong bench of leaders at Google who can smoothly transition when people who’ve had long and successful careers here decide to pursue new opportunities inside and outside the company.”

Searching for itself in an AI-first world

As Google looks for replacements for executives like Porat, it’s also searching for its own identity in a pivotal moment in the company’s history.

The company was caught flat-footed last fall when OpenAI launched its AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, and suddenly found itself in a rare spot where its core search business was threatened.

Industry observers wondered if users could simply get answers from an AI-powered chatbot, how long would they keep entering queries into a search engine? It was an ironic moment for the search giant, given that CEO Sundar Pichai had been talking up the company’s “AI-first” strategy since 2016, with little to show externally.

In June, Google execs admitted to employees that users are “still not quite happy” with the search experience, CNBC reported. Search boss Prabhakar Raghavan and engineering VP HJ Kim spent several minutes pledging to do a better job to employees while Pichai noted that it’s still the most trusted search engine.

Geoffrey Hinton, known as “The godfather of AI” and one of the most respected voices in the field, told The New York Times in May that he was leaving the company after a decade to warn the world about the potential threat of AI, which he said is coming sooner than he previously thought. 

Shortly before that, amid a reorganization in Google’s AI teams, the company promoted the CEO of its DeepMind subsidiary, Demis Hassabis, to lead AI for the entire company, and former McKinsey exec James Manyika to become Google’s senior vice president of technology and society and to oversee Google Research.

Google’s AI head, Jeff Dean, who’s been at the company since 1999, became a chief scientist as part of the change. The company called it a promotion, but it effectively took him out of a large leading role in AI to be an individual contributor, reportedly helping oversee Gemini, one of its critical large language models.

The company is also cutting costs, another rarity, while the core search product faces changing user behavior, ad pullbacks and an AI boom that requires increasing investment, all amid a slowing economy and investor calls to reduce spending.

It’s also staring down multiple federal lawsuits, including an imminent antitrust trial set to begin in September that alleges Google illegally maintained a monopoly by cutting off rivals from search distribution channels.

More like other big companies, some employees say

Employees’ perceptions of the company have also changed in recent years.

While potential employees still consider Google a top place to work with extremely competitive perks, it has grown to be more bureaucratic than in its earlier days.

This perception shift has created a “fragile moment” for Google amid the pressure from OpenAI and Microsoft, argued former Google employee Praveen Seshadri in a Medium post that went viral earlier this year.

“I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function,” wrote Seshadri in his blog post that detailed the challenges of Google’s growing bureaucracy.

“Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs.”

Former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who quit Google in 2021, shared Seshadri’s post on LinkedIn. In a blog post a couple years earlier, Bardin had written that employees aren’t incentivized to build Google products.

“The problem was me — believing I can keep the startup magic within a corporation, in spite of all the evidence showing the opposite,” he wrote in his critique of the company.

Like Seshadri and Bardin, a number of AI specialists have left the company, saying it had grown too bureaucratic to get things done.

Eight AI researchers who created “Transformers,” an integral part of the infrastructure behind ChatGPT and other chatbots, have left the search giant since 2017 — many of them going on to start their own companies. Five of them left in 2021 alone.

Llion Jones, who departed Google this month to start his own company focused on AI, told CNBC’s Jordan Novet, “the bureaucracy had built to the point where I just felt like I couldn’t get anything done.”

Other AI researchers at Google have made similar complaints in recent months. Several have gone on to start their own companies focused on AI, where they have more agency over vision and speed.

In February, longtime product exec Clay Bavor said after 18 “wonderful years” at Google, he was leaving to start an artificial intelligence company with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. “We share an obsession with recent advances in AI, and we’re excited to build a new company to apply AI to solve some of the most important problems in business,” Bavor wrote at the time.

“We’ve made intentional efforts throughout the year to move quickly with nimble teams,” said Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini. “For instance, products like Bard and SGE [Search Generative Experience] are being developed by small, fast-moving teams that have been built for these high-priority efforts.”

Despite its efforts, the company faced criticism from investors and its own employees when it quickly tried to announce its ChatGPT competitor Bard, which it started opening up to the wider public in March. While the rollout’s reputation has rebounded after several updates and a successful developer conference, the company still has yet to launch SGE to the wider public.

The company has also become less flexible as it strives to get employees back into the office.

Google recently cracked down on its hybrid three-day-a-week office policy to include badge tracking, and noted attendance will be included in performance reviews, CNBC previously reported. Additionally, employees who already received approval for remote work may now have that status reevaluated.

There’s also a new emphasis on cost-cutting that has taken some employees by surprise.

Even if the company had been considered slower moving, at least it had been considered secure — commonly known as a place where employees could “rest and vest.” That changed with the company’s first-ever mass layoffs in January, where Alphabet abruptly announced it was eliminating about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, in an overnight email. Some employees reportedly arrived at work to discover their badges no longer worked. It then declined to pay out the remainder of employees’ approved leave time.

While the company included competitive severance packages, some employees lost trust in leadership, who had long encouraged employees to be kind, humble and open-minded, or “Googley.”

The company has also reduced spending on real estate, even asking employees in its cloud unit to share desks. It’s also cut down on desktop PCs and equipment refreshes for employees. It started cutting travel and events late last year.

In an all-hands meeting last September, employees voted to ask Pichai why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” with some of its cutbacks on perks and travel.

Google’s culture can still be enjoyable even if some things, like certain swag items, are getting taken away, the CEO argued.

“I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” Pichai said. “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hardworking startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.” 

Pichai’s statement touched a nerve. Yes, many people joined Google so their work would immediately have an impact of many more users than other companies. It’s still considered one of the top places to work, with opportunities to tackle some of the industry’s biggest problems. But, alongside all that, money and perks had flowed generously, regardless of the speed at which projects moved.

Now, the company faces its biggest challenge yet, which falls on the shoulders of Pichai and the next guard — trying to recreate the magic of its early days along with delivering revenue while being under more pressure than ever.

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

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Amazon Web Services is building equipment to cool Nvidia GPUs as AI boom accelerates

The letters AI, which stands for “artificial intelligence,” stand at the Amazon Web Services booth at the Hannover Messe industrial trade fair in Hannover, Germany, on March 31, 2025.

Julian Stratenschulte | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Amazon said Wednesday that its cloud division has developed hardware to cool down next-generation Nvidia graphics processing units that are used for artificial intelligence workloads.

Nvidia’s GPUs, which have powered the generative AI boom, require massive amounts of energy. That means companies using the processors need additional equipment to cool them down.

Amazon considered erecting data centers that could accommodate widespread liquid cooling to make the most of these power-hungry Nvidia GPUs. But that process would have taken too long, and commercially available equipment wouldn’t have worked, Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at Amazon Web Services, said in a video posted to YouTube.

“They would take up too much data center floor space or increase water usage substantially,” Brown said. “And while some of these solutions could work for lower volumes at other providers, they simply wouldn’t be enough liquid-cooling capacity to support our scale.”

Rather, Amazon engineers conceived of the In-Row Heat Exchanger, or IRHX, that can be plugged into existing and new data centers. More traditional air cooling was sufficient for previous generations of Nvidia chips.

Customers can now access the AWS service as computing instances that go by the name P6e, Brown wrote in a blog post. The new systems accompany Nvidia’s design for dense computing power. Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 packs a single rack with 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs that are wired together to train and run large AI models.

Computing clusters based on Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 have previously been available through Microsoft or CoreWeave. AWS is the world’s largest supplier of cloud infrastructure.

Amazon has rolled out its own infrastructure hardware in the past. The company has custom chips for general-purpose computing and for AI, and designed its own storage servers and networking routers. In running homegrown hardware, Amazon depends less on third-party suppliers, which can benefit the company’s bottom line. In the first quarter, AWS delivered the widest operating margin since at least 2014, and the unit is responsible for most of Amazon’s net income.

Microsoft, the second largest cloud provider, has followed Amazon’s lead and made strides in chip development. In 2023, the company designed its own systems called Sidekicks to cool the Maia AI chips it developed.

WATCH: AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

AWS announces latest CPU chip, will deliver record networking speed

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above $112,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

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Bitcoin rises to fresh record above 2,000, helped by Nvidia-led tech rally

The logo of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin can be seen on a coin in front of a Bitcoin chart.

Silas Stein | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Bitcoin hit a fresh record on Wednesday afternoon as an Nvidia-led rally in equities helped push the price of the cryptocurrency higher into the stock market close.

The price of bitcoin was last up 1.9%, trading at $110,947.49, according to Coin Metrics. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, it hit a high of $112,052.24, surpassing its May 22 record of $111,999.

The flagship cryptocurrency has been trading in a tight range for several weeks despite billions of dollars flowing into bitcoin exchange traded funds. Bitcoin purchases by public companies outpaced ETF inflows in the second quarter. Still, bitcoin is up just 2% in the past month.

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Bitcoin climbs above $112,000

On Wednesday, tech stocks rallied as Nvidia became the first company to briefly touch $4 trillion in market capitalization. In the same session, investors appeared to shrug off the latest tariff developments from President Donald Trump. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite notched a record close.

While institutions broadly have embraced bitcoin’s “digital gold” narrative, it is still a risk asset that rises and falls alongside stocks depending on what’s driving investor sentiment. When the market is in risk-on mode and investors buy growth-oriented assets like tech stocks, bitcoin and crypto tend to rally with them.

Investors have been expecting bitcoin to reach new records in the second half of the year as corporate treasuries accelerate their bitcoin buying sprees and Congress gets closer to passing crypto legislation.

Don’t miss these cryptocurrency insights from CNBC Pro:

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

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Perplexity launches AI-powered web browser for select group of subscribers

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

Perplexity AI on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence-powered web browser called Comet in the startup’s latest effort to compete in the consumer internet market against companies like Google and Microsoft.

Comet will allow users to connect with enterprise applications like Slack and ask complex questions via voice and text, according to a brief demo video Perplexity released on Wednesday.

The browser is available to Perplexity Max subscribers, and the company said invite-only access will roll out to a waitlist over the summer. Perplexity Max costs users $200 per month.

“We built Comet to let the internet do what it has been begging to do: to amplify our intelligence,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Perplexity is best known for its AI-powered search engine that gives users simple answers to questions and links out to the original source material on the web. After the company was accused of plagiarizing content from media outlets, it launched a revenue-sharing model with publishers last year.

In May, Perplexity was in late-stage talks to raise $500 million at a $14 billion valuation, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC. The startup was also approached by Meta earlier this year about a potential acquisition, but the companies did not finalize a deal.

“We will continue to launch new features and functionality for Comet, improve experiences based on your feedback, and focus relentlessly–as we always have–on building accurate and trustworthy AI that fuels human curiosity,” Perplexity said Wednesday.

WATCH: Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

Perplexity CEO on AI race: The market of providing answers to questions will become a commodity

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