Google (GOOGL.US) wants to discover the “next OpenAI”! Launch the “AI Future Fund” to invest in and empower AI startups

The Zhitong Finance App learned that US tech giant Google (GOOGL.US) announced on Monday local time that it will establish and launch a new fund focused on startups in the field of artificial intelligence. Google said that eligible startups will receive investment from Google, and will be able to obtain Google's exclusive AI model and fully configure Google's cloud computing ecosystem as soon as possible, and receive actual technical support from Google's employee team.

Google said in a blog post on Monday that through this special fund called the “AI Future Fund,” eligible startups will receive Google's investment, access exclusive AI models as soon as possible, and actual support from Google's cloud computing ecosystem, Google's AI research team, engineer team, and market development experts. They will also receive credit credits for Google Cloud, the Google Cloud platform. Some analysts said that Google's move is aimed at exploring the “next OpenAI” and seeking to master the leading technology of important AI startups.

The blog post also stated, “Some of these startups have the opportunity to seek direct investment from Google to drive revenue growth and scale up AI technology development.”

When the fund was launched, Google was working to increase participation in the latest AI startups and AI technology trends; at the same time, while the US initial public offering market (i.e. US stock IPO market) and venture capital market were still sluggish due to economic difficulties caused by tariff policies, popular AI startups were also looking for alternative financing channels.

Meanwhile, Amazon, along with Microsoft (the main investor in OpenAI) and Nvidia, are actively investing heavily to support more generative AI startups and develop their own innovative AI software and hardware technology.

Nvidia (NVDA.US), which has the title of “AI chip hegemon”, is also continuing to accelerate its investment in artificial intelligence startups. Since it began investing in 2005, more than half of the tech giant's investments in startups have occurred in the past two years.

When Nvidia invests in AI startups that focus on different application areas, these companies essentially use most of the investment capital to buy Nvidia AI GPUs to build or expand their AI training and inference infrastructure. AI startups require significant computing power resources to train their deep learning models, and Nvidia's GPUs (such as H100, H200, and Blackwell GPUs) are industry standards in terms of performance, making it a natural decision for them to choose Nvidia products.

In the future, when the original founders used AI models or applications developed by AI startups, due to their construction and iterative optimization on Nvidia's ecosystem, these companies will have to continue to rely on Nvidia's full-stack ecosystem software and hardware collaboration platforms during the reasoning and deployment stages, which enables Nvidia to further expand its market share through startups.

Earlier this year, Google invested more than $1 billion in Anthropic, a generative AI startup with the title of “OpenAI rival”. This is an additional investment in AI startups that have previously invested more than $2 billion in Anthropic and held 10% of its shares, as well as large-scale cloud computing service contracts signed between the two parties.

AI startups are critical to the development of the global AI industry, especially the booming enterprise-side AI application market. Unlike global cloud computing giants such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which focus on building an AI application development ecosystem or AI underlying infrastructure, these AI startups focus on various segmented AI application scenarios, which is critical to improving business efficiency or improving the work or learning efficiency of global C-end users. For example, Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence startup from the US, focuses on the cutting-edge field of “AI search”; French AI startup Bioptimus focuses on fully integrating cutting-edge AI technology with medical science and biotechnology.

For Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, early investment in these AI startups that heavily relied on cloud computing platforms to develop AI applications may soon bring strong potential returns and extremely strong AI application support — similar to the exclusive GPT big model call advantage brought by Microsoft's early investment in OpenAI.

According to the application page, the fund will provide technical support to AI startups through Google's Gemini AI big model.

The fund's mission column reads: “We strive to work closely with ambitious AI startups at every stage to quickly achieve breakthrough zero-to-1 products and features, providing them with Google's most advanced AI models, AI expertise, and early access to potential capital to help them turn their bold AI ideas into reality.”