Google CEO On $41B Cloud Run Rate, 1.5M Gemini AI Developers And Oracle Momentum

'Year-to-date, our AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions for Cloud customers have already generated billions in revenues and are being used by more than 2 million developers,' said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s recent Q2 2024 earnings report.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s second quarter 2024 earnings call spoke bullishly about Google Cloud’s record $10.3 billion in quarterly sales, the number of developers using its Gemini AI products as well as its Oracle partnership helping win large AI customer accounts.

On the Google Cloud front, total cloud sales were $10.3 billion for Q2 2024, representing an increase of 29 percent year over year. Google Cloud now has an annual run rate of over $41 billion. Additionally, the cloud company generated record operating income of $1.17 billion during the quarter.

“Google Cloud reached some major milestones,” Pichai said during Google’s earnings call on Tuesday. “Quarterly revenues crossed the $10 billion mark for the first time, at the same time pass the $1 billion mark in quarterly operating profit.”

“Year-to-date, our AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions for Cloud customers have already generated billions in revenues and are being used by more than 2 million developers,” Pichai said. “We are uniquely well-positioned for the AI opportunity ahead.”

The Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant generated a total of $84.7 billion during second quarter 2024, an increase of 14 percent year over year. Google’s operating income reached $27.4 billion in Q2 2024.

“We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack, from chips to agents and beyond—a huge strength,” he said. “We are committed to this leadership long term.”

Pichai: Over 1.5 Million Developers Using Gemini

Pichai said there are now more than 1.5 million developers using Gemini across Google’s developer tools.

“Gemini now comes in four sizes, with each model designed for its own set of use cases. It’s a versatile model family that runs efficiently on everything—from data centers to devices,” he said. “At 2 million tokens, we offer the longest context window of any large-scale foundation model to-date, which powers developer use cases that no other model can handle.”

He added that “Gemini is making Google’s own products better.”

“All six of our products with more than 2 billion monthly users now use Gemini. This means that Google is the company that’s truly bringing AI to everyone,” said Pichai. “People are deeply engaging with Gemini models across Vertex and AI studio. We now have over 2 million developers playing around with these things, and you are definitely seeing early use cases.”

‘Deep’ Oracle Partnership Is Helping

Google Cloud and Oracle have been tightening their technology and go-to-market partnership in recent years. For example, in June, the two companies announced an expanded partnership that gives customers the choice to combine Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Google Cloud technologies to help accelerate application migrations and monomerization.

Pichai said this partnership is helping Google win large enterprise customers such as Hitachi.

“In Google Cloud, we continue to see strong customer interest, winning leading brands like Hitachi, Motorola Mobility, and KPMG. Our deep partnership with Oracle significantly expanded our joint offerings to the large customer base,” Google’s CEO said.

Google AI Customers Include Air Force, Best Buy And Deutsche Bank

Google CEO Pichai also touted its enterprise Vertex AI platform.

“Vertex helps customers such as Deutsche Bank, Kingfisher, and the US Air Force build powerful AI agents,” he said. “Uber and WPP are using Gemini Pro 1.5 and Gemini Flash 1.5 in areas like customer experience and marketing. We broaden support for third-party models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and open-source models like Gemma 2, Llama and Mistral.”

He added that Google’s AI-powered applications portfolio is “helping us win new customers and drive upsell”.

Google’s conversational AI platform is currently being used by customers like Best Buy and Gordon Food Service. “Our AI-powered agents are also helping customers develop better quality software, find insights from their data, and protect their organization against cybersecurity threats using Gemini,” Pichai said.

CEO Touts Google’s Hardware And TPUs

Google has invested billions in 2024 in building new data centers and cloud infrastructure across the globe as well as on AI-specific chips.

“Our TPUs are a key bet,” said Pichai. “Trillium is the sixth generation of our custom AI accelerator, and it’s our best performing and most energy efficient TPU to-date. It achieves a near 5 times increase in peak compute performance per chip and a 67-percent more energy efficient compared to TPU v5e. And the latest Nvidia Blackwell platform, will be coming to Google Cloud in early 2025.”

Pichai said Google will continue to create capacity by allocating resources towards its highest priorities.

“We are relentlessly driving efficiencies in our AI models,” he said. “Over the past quarter, we have made quality improvements that include doubling the core model size for AI overviews, while at the same time improving latency and keeping cost per AI overviews served flat.”