Google Will Spend Up to $185 Billion This Year to Power AI 'Agentic Era': CEO

In brief

• Google plans to spend up to $185 billion this year on AI and cloud infrastructure to power the "agentic era," its CEO said.
• Sundar Pichai said nearly 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated and approved by engineers.
• New deals with Citi, Thinking Machines, and a $750 million partner fund show Google’s plan to monetize agentic AI.

Google is making one of its biggest-ever bets on artificial intelligence.

Speaking Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next event in Las Vegas, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company plans to invest between $175 billion and $185 billion in capital expenditures this year—up from $31 billion in 2022—to build the infrastructure needed for what he called the “agentic era” of AI.

“As we move into the agentic era, we are taking this to the next level,” Pichai said. “We are making big investments now and for the future.”

The spending surge highlights Google’s effort to compete with rivals, including Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI, as the industry shifts from chatbots to autonomous AI agents capable of completing tasks with limited human oversight. According to Pichai, Google is already using those systems internally.

“Today, nearly 75% of all new code at Google is AI-generated and approved by engineers, up from 50% last fall,” he said. “We are now shifting to truly agentic workflows.”

However, despite the push into agentic AI, Pichai emphasized that human engineers review the AI-generated code. He said Google is also using AI to automate parts of its cybersecurity operations, helping teams process large volumes of threat intelligence faster and respond to risks more quickly.

“Each month, our teams receive unstructured threat reports at a scale that will take thousands of hours to review—a nearly impossible task,” he said. “Today, our security operation center agents automatically triage tens of thousands of unstructured threat reports each month by accelerating the extraction of critical intelligence and filtering out the noise. It’s reduced threat mitigation time by over 90%; we are more on the front foot than ever before.”

Google also used Cloud Next to show how it plans to turn that spending into revenue. The tech giant announced a $750 million fund to help its 120,000-member Google Cloud partner ecosystem build and deploy agentic AI products. The initiative includes engineering support, early access to Gemini models, and incentives for companies such as Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey & Company.

While Google used Cloud Next to show how it plans to turn its AI spending into revenue, other companies, including Citi and Thinking Machines Lab, revealed how they are using Google’s infrastructure and AI tools to launch new products and train frontier models.

Citi unveiled “Citi Sky,” an AI-powered wealth management assistant for U.S. clients. At the same time, Thinking Machines Lab said it expanded its use of Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer to accelerate AI research and model training.

“One thing that is super clear: We are firmly in the agentic Gemini era,” Pichai said. “The conversation has gone from ‘Can we build an agent?’ to ‘How do we manage thousands of them?’”

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