By Jennifer Elias
Publication Date: 2026-04-07 22:24:00
With Alphabet poised to earn potentially $100 billion or more from its 2015 bet on Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the explosion of artificial intelligence has opened the door to more startup investments.
“You know SpaceX, Anthropic and so on so, I think now with the AI shift, there are more opportunities on which we can deploy capital in a good way and so we are doing that,” Pichai said, in a conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison posted on Tuesday.
Google has long been in the startup investing game through its early-stage venture group GV and its growth arm CapitalG. But with today’s AI companies requiring checks in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Google parent Alphabet is joining other tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon in skirting the venture route and going big off the balance sheet.
Alphabet first invested in SpaceX in 2015, putting in $900 million at a valuation of about $12 billion. In February, SpaceX merged with…
