Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, closed on Monday, 22 June, down about 5%, marking the steepest single-day drop in over a year. Its performance remains weaker than both the Nasdaq index and other major technology stocks.
Growing concerns over AI competition and the loss of key personnel to rivals in recent days led to a sharp decline in Alphabet’s stock, the most severe since May 2025, when shares fell approximately 7% in one day.
One major factor behind the stock plunge is worry over significant talent departures.
Last week, Noam Shazeer, Google’s Vice President of Engineering and a lead developer on the Gemini AI model team, resigned to join OpenAI, a direct competitor in the AI market.
Shazeer’s departure surprised many, as he had returned to Google less than two years ago.
In August 2024, Google had brought back Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas to the Google DeepMind team through a partnership with Character.AI, a startup the two co-founded after leaving Google in 2021.
Shazeer’s exit came just weeks after Google unveiled new AI model products at its annual developer conference Google I/O, including Gemini 3.5 Flash and the new AI agent Gemini Spark.
Shortly after Shazeer’s announcement, on Friday, John Jumper, Vice President and Engineering Fellow at DeepMind, also resigned after more than nine years to join Anthropic.
Jumper is a world-renowned researcher who, in 2024, received a Nobel Prize alongside Demis Hassabis for AI achievements.
He is best known as a co-creator of AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting the structures of over 200 million proteins, a breakthrough that significantly shortened research timelines in biology and medicine.
Alphabet has invested heavily to accelerate its AI efforts, raising a combined $141 billion through debt and equity since last October.
The company aims to demonstrate that building a comprehensive AI ecosystem—from infrastructure and chips to proprietary AI models—can yield long-term returns.
Besides personnel issues, Alphabet’s stock also faced pressure from comments by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Nadella stated, “The AI industry should not overly rely on a few AI giants,” and observed that “the AI market is entering a phase where technology is becoming commoditized,” meaning AI models from various companies are becoming increasingly similar in capability.
According to Nadella’s view, if AI models become lower-cost and easily interchangeable, investors might question whether Alphabet’s massive spending is truly creating sustainable competitive advantages or merely becoming a cost burden that pressures future profits.
Source:CNBC
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