Not long ago, the consensus on Google was doubt. The company that invented the Transformer couldn’t seem to transform itself.
Research built the plane, but product and strategy couldn’t land it. It had every ingredient for dominance and no recipe for delivery. Meanwhile, rivals shipped, demoed, and dominated headlines.
But, we owe Sundar an apology. Today, Google is moving with the clarity and coordination of a company that spent years laying deep foundations – and is finally building on them at speed. The announcements are landing weekly. The stack they’ve assembled – from custom silicon to frontier models to distribution – looks less like a late start and more like a head start no one noticed.
This isn’t a turnaround story. Google never really dropped the ball. We just mistook silence for stagnation and sentiment turned sour. They’re still not great at narrative but that’s survivable. When your products start speaking for themselves, narrative eventually catches up.
(1) Hardware
At the base sits Ironwood, Google’s 7th-gen TPU – 4× faster than its predecessor and linking up to 9,216 TPUs in a single pod.
For the first time, Google isn’t keeping its crown jewels locked away. Ironwood will be sold externally across cloud partners, with Anthropic buying ~1M chips. A new era: Google as both hyperscaler and hardware merchant, now competing directly with NVIDIA.
(2) Models
Google’s model portfolio has gone from steady to scorching. Across image, video, text, and reasoning – its setting or matching SOTA benchmarks.
The NanoBanana series has become a cultural phenomenon. Its sequel briefly leaked this weekend, and outputs went viral – sharper, richer, more controllable.
Rumors that Apple is negotiating a $1B/year Gemini deal for Siri show how far Google’s ecosystem has come.
(3) Product
Google’s brilliance is finally visible where it matters most: in the hands of billions.
➰ Search has evolved from static results to dynamic AI Overviews reaching 2B users
➰ Gemini Deep Research can now draw on context from your Gmail, Drive and Chat
➰ Chrome has become an AI-native browser
➰ Google Maps has become immersive, generative, and predictive – less navigation, more simulation.
(4) Moonshots
Beyond consumer AI, the moonshot engine is in overdrive:
➰ Project Suncatcher aims at solar-powered orbital data centers.
➰ AlphaFold 3 unlocks new frontiers in drug design.
➰ GraphCast outperforms traditional weather models.
➰ Quantum team is building toward fault-tolerant quantum systems
These aren’t tangents – they’re the long bets that keep Google’s core engine compounding. The company’s superpower has always been time: the ability to fund science until it turns into product.
This is no longer a story about whether Google can ship. It’s about how many fronts it’s shipping on simultaneously.
So yes – sorry, Sundar. We weren’t familiar with your game. Turns out, it’s long-term, vertically integrated, and increasingly hard to beat.