Google’s Sleeper Build In The AI Race Has Rivals Scrambling For Cover

The battle for AI dominance just took a turn, and the dark horse is suddenly in the lead. While OpenAI basked in ChatGPT’s glory for nearly three years, AlphabetGOOGL

was quietly building the advantages that matter most. It’s pretty telling that competitors now admit in private that Google is the American player they worry about most, according to Axios.

The underdog’s time to shine: Wall Street has warmed considerably to Google’s AI positioning after spending early 2025 worried that ChatGPT would dent traditional search activity. The search engine can afford to play a very different game from the cash-hungry startups scrambling for their next funding round. It has elite research teams, massive cash flow from its search empire, and frictionless distribution to billions of users through Chrome, Android, and Search. OpenAI, by contrast, has to chase new capital to fund spending plans that could reach $1.4T over the next eight years, while Google’s advertising and cloud profits can bankroll aggressive AI development without draining reserves.

• Venture capitalist Josh Wolfe says Google’s search profits give it the ability to price Gemini at free or near-free levels — a threat made sharper by the fact that only about 5% of ChatGPT users pay for premium.
• Gemini now counts more than 650M monthly active users, putting it closer to ChatGPT’s reported 800M weekly users, even if the timelines make a direct comparison imperfect.

Google’s Quiet Moonshot

Google can embed Gemini directly into products people already use every day, giving it a distribution advantage few competitors can touch. Reports indicate AppleAAPL

may even rely on Google to power the next generation of Siri, a sign that Apple’s own AI efforts still lag behind Google’s capabilities. That’s exactly why its current valuation stands out in a crowded AI market.

• Alphabet trades near 25x forward earnings, noticeably cheaper than MicrosoftMSFT
  at 29x and NvidiaNVDA
  near 30x, positioning it as the value pick among AI heavyweights.
• Berkshire Hathaway revealed a $4.93B stake in Alphabet — one of Buffett’s final major investments and a rare tech move for the firm — with the stock up 50% this year and leading the “Magnificent Seven.”

Game changer: Anticipation is already building for Gemini 3.0, which Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak expects to deliver stronger reasoning, with Polymarket odds for a release by Nov. 22 jumping to 92%. Mizuho analyst Lloyd Walmsley believes that Gemini 3.0 is expected to deliver major upgrades, adding that “if these capabilities materialize, Gemini 3 could significantly close the gap or claim leadership in multimodal reasoning and enterprise automation.” If that model lands, the next leg of the AI rally may run straight through Google.