on Tuesday (May 19), as revealed by Sundar Pichai A large number of artificial intelligence updates At the annual Google I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, Ruth Porat, the company’s president and chief investment officer, took the stage in scorching New York City to explain the massive financial risks behind the tech giant’s ambitious push into artificial intelligence.
Google’s capital expenditures (CapEx) nearly doubled from last year, rising to an estimated $180 billion to $190 billion in 2026. The company has committed to spending roughly 40 percent of that staggering budget on data center buildouts, with the remaining 60 percent going toward other AI infrastructure like chips. Speaking at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit during an on-stage interview with editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan, Porat explained that this higher spending is a response to an industry-wide “platform shift” that Google simply cannot afford to miss.
“We’ve never seen anything this deep in our lives. You don’t want to be behind the curve,” she said. “It is an incredible privilege to be alive today, especially when you focus on what you can do using technology to advance science, drive economic growth, improve the delivery of vital social services and make advances in health care, education, cybersecurity and security. This upside potential is profound. To achieve it, we clearly need computing power.”
To secure this ability, Google has aggressively combined artificial intelligence chips. As it continues to stock Nvidia GPUs, it is producing large amounts of internal Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to power its Gemini models.
While the current AI boom publicly took off with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Google has long been a leader in AI research. Exactly a decade ago, CEO Pichai famously declared that Google was “Moving from mobile first to AI first“We will invest heavily to lead in AI, and we will have an integrated approach,” Porat explained on Tuesday, noting that the vision still governs senior leadership decisions. “It’s the models, it’s the chips, it’s the research, and it’s the application across all our platforms,” she added.
The AI tools widely available today are far from perfect. Large linguistic models are still vulnerable to ‘hallucinations’. Eliminating these errors requires more computing power and deeper training capabilities.
“One area we are very interested in is providing service to everyone in a high-quality manner, especially when the models are hallucinating,” Porat said. “If you wake up in the middle of the night and your child has a fever, and you want to give Tylenol, it better be right. Google stands for quality, and that was very important to us.”
Leadership lessons Borat learned from Wall Street
Porat took up her role as Google’s president and chief investment officer in September 2023, after serving as CFO for eight years — the longest tenure in the company’s history. Before Google, Porat was CFO at Morgan Stanley.
During the height of the 2008 financial crisis, Porat worked closely with then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, from whom she said she learned her most important leadership lessons.
At the time, she was running a firm covering banks, insurance companies and asset managers as the global economy collapsed. When Paulson needed an elite consulting team to analyze the unfolding collapse, he hired Porat to lead a group of about 40 financial experts.
“When I later moved to Google, I was asked: What are the lessons learned from the financial crisis?” That amazed me “A completely strange question coming from a place where things were going well,” she recalls.
She distilled her lessons from working with Paulson into three core leadership principles, which she now applies to the fast-moving AI landscape.
First, “identify your greatest vulnerability and protect against it early, because you can’t protect against it in that moment when you need it most,” she says. During the financial crisis, that vulnerability was bank liquidity. In the age of artificial intelligence, the weak point is stagnation. “If a competitor uses [a revenue opportunity] And you’re not, the steep curve makes it harder for you to catch up later.
Second, Porat emphasizes that leaders must have the will and financial means to act. “A lot of times, when you mobilize your team and have the will, you don’t have the financial means to catch up,” she said.
Finally, she highlights the importance of building a team that provides “horizontal visibility” – the ability to look across multiple organizational units and identify patterns and trends. “Technology can help, but in a rapidly changing world, a broad vision is essential,” she explained. “As I often say, give me a horizontal view. Then I can connect the dots to the future…These lessons remain fundamental to leadership today.”
