Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has said the company looks poised to go from strength to strength as the global demand for more AI technology continues unabated.
Fresh from hosting the opening keynote at the company’s Google Cloud Next 25 in Las Vegas, Kurian told a media Q&A session attended by TechRadar Pro about the latest challenges facing the business, as well as its myriad of successes.
“(AI) is simplifying technology itself,” Kurian said in the session, “You have the same technology that runs Google, available to every small business…by simplifying the technology, you bring it to everybody.”
“Extremely dynamic” tariff situation
“If you look at the highest level of what we’re trying to do – it’s relatively simple,” Kurian noted, highlighting how Google Cloud has expanded its global footprint to cover 42 regions across the world, with more to come soon.
“Our success is reflected not by what we do, but what customers and partners do with our technology,” he added.
“We are very well-positioned due to the breadth of our portfolio – but also because of the differentiation in what we’re doing with AI.”
Asked about the possible effects of US tariffs on business around the world, Kurian replied with a smile that the tariff discussion is “an extremely dynamic one”, and that Google Cloud has been through many cycles like this (most recently in the Covid crisis) and that he was confident the company will be able to navigate this period too.
“There’s many, many things we do as a technology provider – we are working as a global company, within a geopolitical context, and our solution to that is to work with governments to adapt our technology to government regulations, so that customers can use it in different markets.”
Kurian was also asked about how Google Cloud plans to deal with the rising energy costs caused by the growth in demand for AI.
Stating the company has done “a lot of work” over the past two years to “hugely reduce” the cost of training and inferencing of models, he noted the company will continue to optimize the cost of serving models while improving quality.
Kurian added Google Cloud has more than seven times the water-cooled AI systems as the rest of the world combined, and was also working on implementing nuclear power and sustainable energy sources such as hydroelectric and solar.
“For us, it’s really important that people see AI as being a technology that can also drive both efficiency in the consumption of energy, and also created new forms of energy because of the investments that we are making.”
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