Google's market value evaporated by 1.4 trillion

With the departure of two top AI researchers, Google (Alphabet), which last year formed the "AI Big Three" with OpenAI and Anthropic, experienced its worst trading day in nearly a year on Monday.

By the close of trading, Google's stock price had fallen by more than 5%, wiping out nearly $210 billion in market value (equivalent to 1.4 trillion yuan).

The immediate cause of the sharp drop appears to be the announcement by John Jumper, Vice President of Google's DeepMind, that he is leaving Google to join its main competitor, Anthropic . Jumper, who previously shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for creating the AlphaFold AI model that can predict protein structures.

Also last week, Noam Shazeer, Google's VP of Engineering at DeepMind, announced his departure on social media to join OpenAI to lead research on artificial intelligence architecture .

Sachs is one of the co-authors of the legendary 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which describes the transformer architecture that forms the foundation of today's generative AI.

Due to Google's slow pace in integrating generative AI into its products, Sachs left in 2021 to found the chatbot startup Character.AI. In 2024, Google rehired Sachs through a $2.5 billion licensing agreement and entrusted him with the responsibility of co-leading the development of the Gemini AI model.

With two key figures leaving for a competitor in quick succession, it's no wonder the market is speculating about something ominous about Google.

Meanwhile, from a product perspective, Google's presence in 2026, amidst the intense competition between Anthropic and OpenAI in the "AI agent" arena, will be rather faint .

Last week, media outlets cited a former Google employee who claimed that Google has been "struggling" to sell AI programming tools to businesses.

At the end of last year, with the release of Gemini 3, Google was widely regarded as a leader in the AI ​​field. However, in the AI ​​programming tools and productivity arenas, the company has consistently failed to produce competitive products. At its annual I/O developer conference in mid-January, Google launched several products, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and Spark AI agents, but these failed to generate a significant market response.

As its momentum in the AI ​​competition weakens, the negative impact of massive investments in AI will be difficult to mitigate. Since last October, Alphabet has raised $141 billion through debt and equity .

Meanwhile, rival Microsoft appears to be intentionally starting an "AI price war".

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella publicly criticized the situation over the weekend, saying that "a few companies" are extracting value from this technology while making terrifying predictions about security risks and unemployment, claiming that they need enormous resources to achieve unlimited expansion, and predicting that "the public will not tolerate only a few models and companies doing all the learning for the world."

Last week, Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork, an AI agent that claims to be 30-40% cheaper per prompt compared to Claude Cowork . There are also rumors that Microsoft is considering hosting top-tier open-source model-driven AI products like DeepSeek to further significantly reduce costs.