Google Cloud CEO Says Tech Giant Has ‘Made Billions’ on AI

Google Cloud’s chief executive has reportedly outlined how the company is generating revenue through AI services.

“We’ve made billions using AI already,” Thomas Kurian said Tuesday (Sept. 9) at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco, CNBC reported.

“Our backlog is now at $106 billion — it is growing faster than our revenue. More than 50% of it will convert to revenue over the next two years,” Kurian said.

Google reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing unit, up 32% over the previous year. The company’s cloud business trails those of Microsoft and Amazon, the report noted, but is growing faster than them.

In some cases, the revenue comes from people paying by consumption, such as enterprise customers who purchase artificial intelligence infrastructure. Others pay for cloud services through subscriptions.

“You pay per user per monthly fee — for example, agents or Workspace,” said Kurian, referring to the company’s Gemini products and Google Workspace productivity suite, which come with a number of subscription tiers.

Kurian told the conference that upselling is another important part of Google Cloud’s strategy.

“We also upsell people as they use more of it from one version to another because we have higher quality models and higher-priced tiers,” he said, also noting that Google is capturing new customers more quickly.

“We’ve seen 28% sequential quarter-over-quarter growth in new customer wins in the first half of the year,” said Kurian, with nearly two-thirds of customers already using Google Cloud’s AI tools.

In other Google Cloud news, the company’s head of strategy, Web3 said recently that Google’s Layer 1 blockchain will provide a neutral infrastructure layer for use by financial institutions.

In a post on LinkedIn, Rich Widmann wrote that the blockchain, Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), “brings together years of R&D at Google to provide financial institutions with a novel Layer 1 that is performant, credibly neutral and enables Python-based smart contracts.”

Linking to a March report by PYMNTS, Widmann added that CME Group employed GCUL to as it explored tokenization and payments on its commodities exchange.

“Besides bringing to bear Google’s distribution, GCUL is a neutral infrastructure layer,” Widmann wrote in his post. “Tether won’t use Circle’s blockchain — and Adyen probably won’t use Stripe’s blockchain. But any financial institution can build with GCUL.”

Widmann said Google Cloud will reveal additional technical details about GCUL within months.

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