S&P Global has opted for a multimodel AI approach to boost efficiency. The strategy is comparable to a multicloud approach, Gia Winters, managing director of North America at Google Cloud, told FinAI News. The financial services company teamed up with Google Cloud in December 2025 to use the tech provider’s Vertex AI platform, allowing S&P to access Google Gemini and other third-party and open-source models, Winters said. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform is used by S&P to provide clients with […]
In 2026, AI will evolve from a tactical add-on to the strategic engine of the modern financial institution. The journey has been a sprint. In 2024, the industry focused on models — finding the right large language model for the task. This quickly matured into a focus on platforms to ensure governance and security. Today, we embrace […]
BNY and Google Cloud today announced the integration of Gemini Enterprise — Google Cloud’s agentic AI platform — into BNY’s enterprise AI system, Eliza. The move enhances Eliza’s agentic deep-research tools for market analysis and brings multimodal capabilities to BNY’s global workforce, the companies shared in a release today. Employees can now build AI agents […]
Global payments provider Klarna is partnering with Google Cloud to use artificial intelligence to enhance its payment services for more than 114 million consumers worldwide. The AI-first collaboration will leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure and models to accelerate Klarna’s development of smarter, more personalized payment and shopping tools. Early pilots have already shown a 50% increase […]
Financial institutions are increasingly deploying AI and the latest driver of returns on that investment is agentic AI. Seventy-seven percent of financial service executives report their organizations have achieved positive ROI within the first year of deployment, according to Google Cloud’s “The ROI of AI: Financial Services” report. The findings, released Sept. 29, are based […]
Financial institutions are increasingly deploying AI and the latest driver of returns on that investment is agentic AI. Seventy-seven percent of financial service executives report their organizations have achieved positive ROI within the first year of deployment, according to Google Cloud’s “The ROI of AI: Financial Services” report. The findings, released Sept. 29, are based […]
The $100 billion partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI, announced Monday, represents – for now – the latest mega-deal reshaping the AI infrastructure landscape. The agreement involves non-voting shares tied to massive chip purchases and enough computing power for more than 5 million U.S. households, deepening the relationship between two of AI’s most powerful players.
Meanwhile, Google Cloud is placing a different bet entirely. While the industry’s biggest players cement ever-tighter partnerships, Google Cloud is hellbent on capturing the next generation of AI companies before they become too big to court.
Francis deSouza, its COO, has seen the AI revolution from multiple vantage points. As the former CEO of genomics giant Illumina, he watched machine learning transform drug discovery. As co-founder of a two-year-old AI alignment startup, Synth Labs, he has grappled with the safety challenges of increasingly powerful models. Now, having joined the C-suite at Google Cloud in January, he’s orchestrating a massive wager on AI’s second wave.
It’s a story deSouza likes to tell in numbers. In a conversation with this editor, he notes several times that nine out of the top 10 AI labs use Google’s infrastructure. He also says that nearly all generative AI unicorns run on Google Cloud, that 60% of all gen AI startups worldwide have chosen Google as their cloud provider, and that the company has lined up $58 billion in new revenue commitments over the next two years, which represents more than double its current annual run rate.
Asked what percentage of Google Cloud’s revenue comes from AI companies, he offers instead that “AI is resetting the cloud market, and Google Cloud is leading the way, especially with startups.”
The Nvidia-OpenAI deal exemplifies the scale of consolidation sweeping AI infrastructure. Microsoft’s original $1 billion OpenAI investment has grown to nearly $14 billion. Amazon followed with $8 billion in Anthropic investments, securing deep hardware customizations that essentially tailor AI training to work better with Amazon’s infrastructure. Oracle has emerged as a surprise winner, too, landing a $30 billion cloud deal with OpenAI and then securing a jaw-dropping $300 billion five-year commitment starting in 2027.
Even Meta, despite building its own infrastructure, signed a $10 billion deal with Google Cloud while planning $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure spending through 2028. The Trump administration’s $500 billion “Stargate” project, involving SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle, adds another layer to these interlocking partnerships.
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These gigantic deals might seem threatening for Google, given the partnerships that companies like OpenAI and Nvidia appear to be cementing elsewhere. In fact, it looks a lot like Google is being cut out of some frenzied dealmaking.
The Google logo appears during a meeting between Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at Google for Startups in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Image Credits:Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto / Getty Images
But the corporate behemoth isn’t exactly sitting on its hands. Instead, Google Cloud is signing smaller companies like Loveable and Windsurf — what deSouza calls the “next generation of companies coming up”– as “primary computing partners” without major upfront investments.
The approach reflects both opportunity and necessity. In a market where companies can go “from being a startup to being a multi-billion dollar company in a very short period of time,” as deSouza puts it, capturing future unicorns before they mature could prove more valuable than fighting over today’s giants.
The strategy extends beyond simple customer acquisition. Google offers AI startups $350,000 in cloud credits, access to its technical teams, and go-to-market support through its marketplace. Google Cloud also provides what deSouza describes as a “no compromise” AI stack – from chips to models to applications – with an “open ethos” that gives customers choice at every layer.
“Companies love the fact that they can get access to our AI stack, they can get access to our teams to understand where our technologies are going,” deSouza says during our interview. “They also love that they’re getting access to enterprise grade Google class infrastructure.”
Google’s infrastructure play got even more ambitious recently, with reporting revealing the company’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to expand its custom AI chip business. According to The Information, Google has struck deals to place its tensor processing units (TPUs) in other cloud providers’ data centers for the first time, including an agreement with London-based Fluidstack that includes up to $3.2 billion in financial backing for a New York facility.
Competing directly with AI companies while simultaneously providing them infrastructure requires — let’s call it — finesse. Google Cloud provides TPU chips to OpenAI and hosts Anthropic’s Claude model through its Vertex AI platform, even as its own Gemini models compete head-to-head with both. (Google Cloud’s parent company, Alphabet, also owns a 14% stake in Anthropic, per New York Times court documents obtained earlier this year, though when asked directly about Google’s financial relationship with Anthropic, deSouza calls the relationship a “multi-layered partnership” then quickly redirects me to Google Cloud’s model marketplace – noting that customers can access various foundation models.)
But if Google is trying to be Switzerland while advancing its own agenda, it has had plenty of practice. The approach has roots in Google’s open-source contributions, from Kubernetes to the foundational “Attention is All You Need” paper that enabled the transformer architecture underlying most modern AI. More recently, Google published an open-source protocol called Agent-to-Agent (A2A) for inter-agent communication in an attempt to demonstrate its continued commitment to openness even in competitive areas.
“We have made the explicit choice over the years to be open at every layer of the stack, and we know that this means companies can absolutely take our technology and use it to build a competitor at the next layer,” deSouza acknowledges. “That’s been happening for decades. That’s something we are okay with.”
Google Cloud’s courtship of startups comes at a particularly interesting moment. Just this month, federal judge Amit Mehta delivered a nuanced ruling in the government’s five-year-old search monopoly case, attempting to curb Google’s dominance without hampering its AI ambitions.
While Google avoided the Justice Department’s most severe proposed penalties, including the forced divestment of its Chrome browser, the ruling underscored regulatory concerns about the company leveraging its search monopoly to dominate AI. Critics are worried, understandably, that Google’s vast trove of search data provides an unfair advantage in developing AI systems, and that the company could deploy the same monopolistic tactics that secured its search dominance.
In conversation, deSouza is focused on far more positive outcomes. “I think we have an opportunity to fundamentally understand some of the major diseases that today we just don’t have a good understanding of,” deSouza says, for example, outlining a vision where Google Cloud helps power research into Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and climate technologies. “We want to work very hard to make sure that we are pioneering the technologies that will enable that work.”
Critics may not easily be assuaged. By positioning itself as an open platform that empowers rather than controls the next generation of AI companies, Google Cloud may be showing regulators that it fosters competition rather than stifles it, all while forging relationships with startups that might help Google’s case if regulators ramp up pressure.
For our full chat with deSouza, check out this week’s StrictlyVC Download podcast; a new episode comes out every Tuesday.
Google Maps is in the process of recovering from an outage that left the mobile version of the service unable to fully load its map or provide directions. Over 4,000 reports were filed on Downdetector since the outage started, and Google’s Status Dashboard noted that the company was investigating an issue with the Maps SDK and Navigation SDK at 3:34PM ET.
At the peak of the outage, both the Android and iOS versions of Google Maps were unable to fully load a map, display listings or provide directions. In at least one case, the apps also showed an error message saying that Google Maps “Cannot reach server.” Whatever caused the outage hasn’t extend to the web version of the navigation service, which continues to work as normal.
Ian Carlos Campbell for Engadget
Google’s dashboard updated to say that “mitigation work is currently underway by our engineering team” and that it was “seeing indications of recovery” at around 5:22PM ET. Around 30 minutes later, the company said that the issue was partially resolved, but that it couldn’t share “an ETA for full resolution at this point.”
In the description of the issue on Google’s Status Dashboard, Google has yet to provide an explanation for the outage or detailed what it’s doing to fix the issue. Engadget has contacted Google for more information and will update this article if we here back.
Google’s last major outage occurred in June, though it was primarily concentrated in the company’s Google Cloud service. Given the number of clients who use Google Cloud, the outage impacted everything from Spotify to Snapchat for multiple hours.
Update, September 11, 2025, 6:09PM ET: Updated article again to include details from Google’s Status Dashboard.
Update, September 11, 2025, 5:38PM ET: Updated article to include new information shared on Google’s Status Dashboard.
AI is making a mark in marketing, security, and customer experience, according to a new Google Cloud report, which surveyed 3,500 senior leaders at global companies to find a clear use case for AI — and figure out if leaders had seen a return on their AI investments.
Each leader surveyed works for a business that earns at least $10 million in annual revenue, has at least 100 employees, and leverages generative AI. The majority of respondents (55%) indicated that AI was a useful marketing tool, helping them with tasks like data analysis, content generation, and editing. Nearly 60% of executives at media and entertainment firms indicated that AI had a positive impact on their marketing efforts.
Security was also an area where AI was useful to executives, according to the report. AI security tools combat cyberthreats by automatically detecting intruders and analyzing incidents. Almost half of executives (49%) said in the survey that AI helped with cybersecurity. Of that group, 53% stated that AI had diminished the number of security incidents reported in their organizations.
Executives also found that AI improved customer experience. Close to 62% of leaders said that AI had enabled them to deliver better customer service, an increase from 59% of respondents who answered the same survey in 2024. Three in four leaders said customer satisfaction improved as a result of AI this year.
The survey also sought to uncover whether AI had delivered a strong return on investment for organizations. Only 40% of respondents stated that AI had directly caused revenue growth for their companies, but 70% said that AI had made employees more productive.
Google Cloud’s VP of Global Generative AI, Oliver Parker, wrote that the report indicated that AI hype in organizations is calming down.
“The conversation has shifted to value,” he wrote.
The report’s findings contrast with research published last month by MIT, which found that though U.S. businesses have invested up to $40 billion in AI altogether, the overwhelming majority (95%) have yet to see a return on their investments or an impact on profits.
AI is making a mark in marketing, security, and customer experience, according to a new Google Cloud report, which surveyed 3,500 senior leaders at global companies to find a clear use case for AI — and figure out if leaders had seen a return on their AI investments.
Each leader surveyed works for a business that earns at least $10 million in annual revenue, has at least 100 employees, and leverages generative AI. The majority of respondents (55%) indicated that AI was a useful marketing tool, helping them with tasks like data analysis, content generation, and editing. Nearly 60% of executives at media and entertainment firms indicated that AI had a positive impact on their marketing efforts.
Scotiabank is exploring the use of AI and generative AI to bolster its cybersecurity infrastructure and aims to work with vendors to develop the technology. Google Cloud is in the running to partner on the tech, Louise Dandonneau, vice president of cybersecurity operations, told Bank Automation News. “We have announced our partnership with Google Cloud, […]
Wells Fargo looks across all of its business lines when making investment decisions and selecting technology vendors. For the $1.7 trillion bank, working with vendors is “about the direction of the firm, our customer-forward focus and then thinking about intention and modernizing our core infrastructure,” Jazz Samra, head of strategic partnerships and innovation initiatives, told […]
Financial institutions are looking to AI and generative AI to mitigate the rising risk of cyberattacks as fraudsters take advantage of the technology. Generative AI has allowed financial institutions to beef up their cybersecurity but has also lowered the barrier of entry for low-skilled adversaries to launch sophisticated attacks, according to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s 2024 […]
ING Bank is moving its operations to the cloud for scalability, efficiency and security. The $967 billion bank’s operations are 65% on a private cloud, Marco Eijsackers, head of the CIO office at ING, told Bank Automation News. “We started our migration in 2014-15 in partnership with Microsoft by building private clouds,” Eijsackers said. “Back […]
James Dean, global generative AI specialist and financial services industry lead at Google Cloud, will speak at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 on Monday, March 18, at 3:15 p.m. CT.
Dean will join the panel “RPA: New approaches and techniques” with Luther Liang, director of product at Grasshopper Bank; David Lyons, intelligent automation program manager at Discover Financial Services; and Mike Reynolds, business technology executive at KeyBank.
Courtesy/LinkedIn
During the session, panelists will discuss:
How to use process mining and discovery to design automation.
In an interview with Bank Automation News, Dean talked about how financial institutions should approach gen AI, new uses for gen AI and innovations at Google Cloud. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Bank Automation News: How should financial institutions approach generative AI?
James Dean: Financial Institutions must strike a balance between embracing innovation and managing risks. A pragmatic “test and learn” approach and clear use-case prioritization are keys to success. All priority use cases should have clear intentions, objectives and outputs they want to achieve. Moreover, metrics must be tied to use cases on what value generative AI will bring.
BAN: What are Google Cloud’s bank clients expecting out of generative AI?
JD: Banks are keen on leveraging generative AI across four main objectives.
They want to use generative AI to cut costs, simply said.
They want to improve the customer experience, increasing NPS, CSAT and overall satisfaction of their business.
They are looking for ways generative AI can reduce risk in their business, whether that be improving fraud detection or enhancing anti-money laundering compliance or improving credit risk assessment.
There is a great opportunity to identify new revenue streams. One example is Hyper-Personalized Product Development and Cross-Selling with generative AI to identify unmet needs or pain points. For example, a mortgage customer might get pre-approved for home insurance tailored to their property at the right time.
BAN: What uses of generative AI are you seeing emerge for FIs to leverage?
JD: One way FIs are taking costs out of their business is using generative AI in Intelligent Document Processing. What was done mostly by people now can be achieved with automated extraction of key information from documents (contracts, applications, loan agreements, etc.), reducing manual labor and errors. Another example is self-service chatbots and automated virtual agents as they have advanced using generative AI to the point that customers are very comfortable interacting with them because generative AI has allowed them to communicate like a human with a level of efficiency that customers get what they want faster than they ever could before (no more holding on line or dealing with novice agents).
BAN: What’s on the generative AI roadmap for Google Cloud?
JD: In December, we took a significant step on our journey to make AI more helpful for everyone with the start of the Gemini era, setting a new state of the art across a wide range of text, image, audio and video benchmarks.
However, Gemini is evolving to be more than just the models. It supports an entire ecosystem — from the products that billions of people use every day to the APIs and platforms helping developers and businesses innovate. Gemini is available in 40 languages on the web, and with the new Gemini app on Android and on the Google app on iOS. Gemini Ultra, one of our newest versions, creates a new experience far more capable at reasoning, following instructions, coding and creative collaboration.
For example, it can be a personal tutor tailored to your learning style. Or it can be a creative partner, helping you plan a content strategy or build a business plan. We also recently announced our next-generation model, Gemini Pro 1.5. Gemini Pro 1.5 delivers dramatically enhanced performance optimized for scaling across a wide range of tasks and it introduces a breakthrough experimental feature in long-context understanding.
BAN: What are you most looking forward to during your panel discussion at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024?
JD: I am most looking forward to the panel discussion and sharing with the audience how generative AI will help create the AI bank of the future by discussing how banks can pragmatically and responsibly leverage these new technologies today to take costs out of their business, improve the customer experience, reduce risk and create new revenue streams.
Join us for Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2024 in Nashville, Tenn., on March 18-19! Discover the latest advancements in AI and automation in banking. Register now.
HSBC is teaming with Google Cloud to provide financing to climate-mitigating companies on the cloud providerâs network. Google Cloud will connect the companies with HSBCâs climate tech finance team to explore venture debt financing options, according to a Feb. 8 release. The Google Cloud Ready â Sustainability program tracks companies that help their customers achieve […]
Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) reported its fourth quarter earnings after the bell on Tuesday, missing analysts’ expectations on ad revenue, the heart of the tech giant’s business.
The stock slid 4% lower in extended trading.
Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs for the third quarter, was $72 billion versus expectations of nearly $71 billion. That’s higher than the $63.12 billion the company generated during the same period in the prior year. But investors seemed to focus on the advertising miss.
The company reported continued growth in its cloud business, which has grown in importance to investors because of its usefulness in the development of AI. Google Cloud revenue beat expectations, crossing $9 billion, amounting to a 26% jump from a year ago.The company has been pushing to claim additional market share in the cloud computing market, where it currently sits in third place behind competitors Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT).
Here are some of Alphabet’s most significant metrics compared to what Wall Street was expecting in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter, according to data from Bloomberg:
Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $72.32 billion vs. $70.97 billion expected ($63.12 billion in Q4 2022)
Adjusted earnings per share: $1.64 vs. $1.59 expected ($1.05 in Q4 2022)
Cloud revenue: $9.19 billion vs. $8.95 billion expected ($7.32 billion in Q4 2022)
Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022)
During a call with analysts, both CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat noted the importance of streamlining the business to achieve cost savings and efficiency.
“Across different teams we have wound down some non-priority projects which will help us invest and operate well in our growth areas,” said Pichai.
Porat said the company is focused on removing organizational layers to boost efficiency, which has resulted in a slower pace of hiring. But she added that the company will continue to invest in top talent.
The earnings report arrives just weeks after Google laid off hundreds of workers across multiple divisions as the company aims to cut expenses and focus on growth areas, including AI. The tech giant joins several of its peers and others across corporate America that have relied on layoffs to boost efficiency in the wake of significant expansions in the COVID era.
Google’s executives also responded to concerns that the advancement of AI may disrupt the company’s search products since generative AI chatbots change the way people interact with the web.
Pichai said that AI tools expand Google’s arsenal, which offers a breadth and depth of information to users who crave a diversity of sources online.
Google has been widely seen as playing catch-up to Microsoft, which was among the first in the tech world to reap the cultural excitement around consumer AI chatbots. Microsoft invested in OpenAI, the company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT.
Google has embarked on a host of efforts to both augment its search tools with AI (Bard and Search Generative Experience) and to offer new, advanced large language models, like Gemini.
Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on Twitter @hshaban.
Eight in 10 financial institutions will migrate at least half their core systems to the cloud starting in 2024 in search of efficient operations, robust tech stacks and quick access to data. According to technology provider Galileo’s “pivotal trend” predictions for 2024, 82% of financial institutions plan to modernize their systems with core migrations to […]
Santander Bank has successfully moved its corporate investment banking business to the cloud as part of its effort to migrate all of its operations. The $1.9 trillion, Madrid-based bank created its cloud-native digital banking platform, Gravity, last year on Google Cloud’s platform, and plans to move more operations to the platform next year, a Santander […]
Efficiency and cost-savings are two reasons financial institutions are tapping into their cloud providers’ AI capabilities rather than building the technology in-house. The cloud is serving as a gateway to financial institution clients to “reap the benefits of AI,” William Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, told Bank Automation News. […]
Efficiency and cost-savings are two reasons financial institutions are tapping into their cloud providers’ AI capabilities rather than building the technology in-house. The cloud is serving as a gateway to financial institution clients to “reap the benefits of AI,” William Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, told Bank Automation News. […]
