ChatGPT is 3 and Google just crashed the party
Today, this hesitation resembles the moment when Google let someone else take control of its future. OpenAI did exactly what Google chose not to do: It put the chatbot front and center. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it not only wowed the world; It revealed how slowly Google had moved to commercialize its own breakthroughs, including the OpenAI transformer architecture that Google borrowed liberally from a 2017 study.
But as ChatGPT celebrates its third anniversary, the pendulum is swinging back.
Accordingly BloombergAlphabet’s resurgence is so strong that the stock is now within striking distance of Nvidia’s $4.2 trillion valuation, driven by rave reviews for its Gemini 3 model and rising demand for its homegrown tensor processing units (TPUs).
Google has spent the last three years largely behind the scenes building a full-fledged AI ecosystem, from chips to cloud infrastructure, from leading models to consumer applications. The payoff is now visible everywhere: a revitalized cloud business, growing demand for homegrown AI chips, and a new generation of Gemini models that have earned industry respect and shaken up rivals from OpenAI to Nvidia.
Also Read: ChatGPT effect: In three years, AI chatbot has changed the way people search
Gemini 3 moment
Google’s turning point came with the release of Gemini 3. The model was immediately praised for its reasoning ability, coding abilities, and performance on niche tasks that typically confound chatbots. It quickly climbed the AI leaderboards, prompting Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s founding members, to call it “clearly a Tier 1 (Large Language Model) LLM.” For Google, this was a sign of vindication. A company once accused of moving too slowly is suddenly catching up to OpenAI.
The chip game no one saw coming
What makes Google’s rise more striking is how deeply vertical its AI bets have become.
Google is one of the only companies on the planet that produces the entire AI stack: the applications (like the Nano Banana image generator), the underlying models, the cloud infrastructure, and the chips underneath. Once used almost exclusively by Google, demand for TPUs is now on the rise.
AI startup Anthropic has struck a deal to use up to 1 million Google TPUs, a contract worth tens of billions of dollars. Meta is reportedly investigating Google’s chips for data centers starting in 2027; This is a development that sent Alphabet’s valuation soaring, triggering a sell-off at SoftBank (which backs OpenAI) and a decline in Nvidia shares.
As Ben Barringer from Quilter Cheviot says Bloomberg“Many others have failed in their quest to build custom chips, but Google can clearly add another string here.”
Wall Street gave up on the “Google is behind it” rhetoric
Alphabet has gained nearly $1 trillion in market value since mid-October, fueled by Warren Buffett’s $4.9 billion stake and a growing belief that Google will not leave the AI future to OpenAI, Microsoft or anyone else.
Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research summed it up best when he said Google has always been a “sleeping giant” and suddenly it’s woken up.
A company built for the long game
Google’s self-confidence has long been rooted in its economics. It has:
- A massive, constantly updated collection of data
- A profitable core business that funds Moonshot R&D
- Large-scale computing infrastructure
Also Read: As Gemini 3 gains steam, does Google-Alphabet become the new leader of AI stocks?
A unified, full-spectrum approach to AI
CEO Sundar Pichai made it clear on the earnings call: “We’ve taken a full, deep, comprehensive approach to AI. And it really works.”
This approach accelerated after a 2023 restructuring that saw DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis named head of Google’s combined AI division. Hassabis’ task: to focus almost exclusively on frontier models and move forward. He reportedly prevented key talent from defecting despite multimillion-dollar offers from rivals.
Google’s meteoric market rally and warnings
Alphabet’s rally has pushed its valuation beyond historical norms. Forward earnings multiplier increased to 27 times; It exceeded the 10-year average of 20 times. Bloomberg noted. The 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) touched 75, indicating the stock may be overbought.
Matthew Maley from Miller Tabak told Bloomberg He also warned that Google “could take a leadership role in the AI industry going forward” but that shares “may be time to pull back.”
Competition doesn’t stop
But OpenAI still leads in consumer mindshare. ChatGPT recently reached 800 million weekly users, while Google says 650 million people use the Gemini app. Additionally, OpenAI and Microsoft have deeper enterprise traction than Google Cloud, which ranks third behind AWS and Azure.
But, Bloomberg He notes that Google’s AI momentum is undeniable, even if corporate adoption lags. As Forrester’s Thomas Husson told the publication: “It’s certainly fair to say that Google is back in the game with Gemini 3.”
He added that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Google’s demise have been “greatly exaggerated.”
Also Read: Google’s AI infrastructure triples to over $90 billion as Pichai downplays bubble fears
Three years later, OpenAI is no longer alone
As ChatGPT completes its three-year anniversary, the AI landscape looks very different from the OpenAI landscape that dominates in 2022. At the time, Google was scrambling to respond with a product inspired by its own research. Today, Google has quietly leveraged its depth of research, infrastructure, and chip strategy to challenge OpenAI’s first-mover advantage.
As much as OpenAI has propelled the industry into the age of productive AI, it is Google that has spent the last three years building the machine that could define what comes next.
