DeepMind Head: Google AI Spending Could Exceed $100 Billion

Google’s top AI executive says the company’s spending on the technology will surpass $100 billion.

While speaking Monday (April 15) at a TED Conference in Vancouver, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis was asked about recent reports of Microsoft and OpenAI’s planned artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer known as “Stargate,” said to cost $100 billion.

“We don’t talk about our specific numbers, but I think we’re investing more than that over time,” said Hassabis, whose comments were reported by Bloomberg News. 

Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind in 2010 before it was bought by Google four years later, did not offer further details on the potential AI investment, the report said. He also told the audience Google’s computer power surpasses that of competitors like Microsoft.

“That’s one of the reasons we teamed up with Google back in 2014, is we knew that in order to get to AGI we would need a lot of compute,” he said, referring to artificial general intelligence, or AI that surpasses the intelligence of humans.

“That’s what’s transpired,” he said. “And Google had and still has the most computers.”

Hassabis added that the massive interest kicked off by OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI model demonstrated the public was ready for the technology, even if AI systems are still prone to errors.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, the “Stargate” project spotlights the increasing role of AI in fueling innovation and determining the future of commerce. Experts believe that as tech giants invest heavily in AI research and infrastructure, the creation of sophisticated AI systems could revolutionize areas like personalized marketing and supply chain optimization. 

“It is important to consider the potential impact on jobs and the workforce,” Jiahao Sun, founder and CEO at FLock.io, a platform for decentralized AI models, said in an interview with PYMNTS.

“As AI becomes more capable in multimodal and integrated into commerce, it may automate industries that currently cannot easily be transferred into a “chatbot” interface, such as manufacturing, healthcare, sports coaching, etc.”

Microsoft and OpenAI’s $100 billion project could make AI chips more scarce, leading to more price spikes and leaving more businesses and governments behind due to limited access to hardware, CEO and co-founder of AI company NeuReality Moshe Tanach told PYMNTS, while adding that projects like Stargate will drive commerce forward in the short term.

“The installed hardware will fuel more AI projects, features and use cases, leading Microsoft to offer it at consumable prices, driving innovation on the consumer side with secondary use cases built on this accessible AI technology,” Tanach said.