You know that thing where your biggest rival borrows your tools to try to beat you, and you still smile and hand them over? That is basically what Google just did with OpenAI.
On a recent earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he’s “very excited” to be partnering with OpenAI through Google Cloud. That is right, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and arguably the biggest threat to Google Search since the dawn of Yahoo, is now a paying customer.
“We’re very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud,” Pichai said, keeping his voice cool as a cucumber. “It’s an open platform,” he added, in what might be the understatement of the AI decade.
This cozy arrangement follows reports that OpenAI has started using Google Cloud’s computing power, which includes those deliciously rare Nvidia GPUs and Google’s own in-house TPU chips, to keep its models running and training. The move helps OpenAI scale ChatGPT (and whatever GPT-5 mutant is lurking around the corner), especially as Microsoft’s servers get a little… congested.
Google Is Helping OpenAI… Compete With Google?
Pretty much. It is like renting your garage to the person trying to steal your job. On the one hand, OpenAI becomes a major new client for Google Cloud. On the other hand, OpenAI’s products directly challenge Google’s most important business: Search.
That is the tension here. This partnership could mean big money for Google Cloud (which, by the way, just hit $13.6 billion in revenue this quarter, up from $10.3 billion last year). But it also means Google might be accelerating the very AI revolution that could eat its lunch.
This is not Google’s first rodeo with AI lab partnerships either. It is already hosting big names like Anthropic, World Labs (run by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li), and Safe Superintelligence (from OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever). If you are building bleeding-edge AI and need a lot of GPU firepower, Google Cloud has a “come on in” sign hanging out front.
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On the home front, Pichai shared that Gemini, Google’s flagship chatbot, now has 450 million monthly active users, while AI Overviews, those chatbot-like answers at the top of Search, are reaching 2 billion users a month. Not too shabby.
But how those numbers translate into dollars (or affect core search traffic) is still fuzzy. For now, it seems Google is both building its own AI empire and renting out its infrastructure to anyone else trying to do the same.
The whole situation is giving major déjà vu. Flashback to the early 2000s, when a tiny Google got a boost from Yahoo, only to eventually steamroll it. Could OpenAI be the Google in this equation now? And if so, is Sundar Pichai playing the role of the overly generous Yahoo?
Time will tell. But if nothing else, this partnership is proof that in tech, “frenemy” is a business model. Google just handed OpenAI the keys to its cloud empire, even as it tries to beat them at the AI game. Is this strategic genius or just history repeating itself with a glossier UI and more GPUs? Because if you rent your enemy the rocket fuel… do not be surprised when they shoot past you.
