Google Launches AI Future Fund to Empower Startups
2min read Google, the American tech giant, has announced the launch of a new fund focused on investing in and empowering artificial intelligence (AI) startups. The "AI Future Fund" aims to provide eligible startups with Google's investment, early access to its exclusive AI large models, comprehensive configuration of the Google Cloud computing ecosystem, and practical technical support from Google's employee teams.
Through this fund, startups will gain access to Google's investment, early access to its exclusive AI large models, and support from Google Cloud computing, Google's AI research team, engineering team, and market expansion experts. They will also receive credit for the Google Cloud platform. Analysts suggest that Google's move is aimed at discovering the "next OpenAI" and securing a leading position in important AI startup technologies.
Google's blog post also mentioned that some startups may seek direct investment from Google to drive revenue growth and expand AI technology development. The fund's launch comes as Google seeks to increase its involvement with the latest AI startups and trends, while the economic downturn caused by tariff policies has kept the U.S. IPO and venture capital markets subdued. Hot AI startups are also looking for alternative financing channels.
Meanwhile, Amazon, Microsoft (the primary investor in OpenAI), and NVIDIA are actively investing heavily in more generative AI startups and developing their own innovative AI software and hardware technologies. NVIDIA, known as the "AI chip king," has accelerated its investment in AI startups, with more than half of its startup investments in the past two years occurring in the last two years.
When NVIDIA invests in AI startups focused on different application areas, these companies typically use most of the investment funds to purchase NVIDIA AI GPUs to build or expand their AI training and inference infrastructure. AI startups require a large amount of computing resources to train their deep learning models, and NVIDIA's GPUs (such as H100, H200, and Blackwell GPU) set the industry standard for performance, making the choice of NVIDIA's products a natural decision.
In the future, when these startups use the AI large models or applications developed by these AI startups, these companies will have to continue to rely on NVIDIA's full-stack ecosystem of software and hardware collaboration during the inference and deployment stages, allowing NVIDIA to further expand its market share through these startups.
Earlier this year, Google invested over $10 billion in Anthropic, a generative AI startup known as the "rival of OpenAI." This investment came on top of Google's previous investment of over $20 billion and a 10% stake in Anthropic, as well as a large cloud computing service contract between the two companies.
AI startups play a crucial role in the development of the global AI industry, particularly in the booming enterprise AI application market. Unlike global cloud computing giants such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which focus on building AI application development ecosystems or AI foundational infrastructure, these AI startups focus on various different AI application scenarios. They are essential for improving enterprise operational efficiency or enhancing the work or learning efficiency of global end-users. For example, Perplexity AI, an AI startup from the U.S., focuses on the cutting-edge field of "AI search," while Bioptimus, an AI startup from France, focuses on integrating cutting-edge AI technology with medical science and biotechnology.
For Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, early investment in these AI startups that heavily rely on cloud computing platforms to develop AI applications could yield strong potential returns and powerful AI application support in the near future, similar to the exclusive GPT large model call advantage that Microsoft gained from its early investment in OpenAI.
The fund will provide technical support to AI startups through Google's Gemini AI large model. The mission statement of the fund reads: "We strive to work closely with ambitious AI startups at all stages, quickly achieving breakthroughs from 0 to 1 in products and features, providing them with early access to Google's most advanced AI large models, AI expertise, and potential funding to help them turn bold AI visions into reality."
