Google aims to discover the "next OpenAI"! Launching the "AI Future Fund" to invest in and empower AI startups

According to Zhitong Finance APP, on Monday local time, American tech giant Google (GOOGL.US) announced the establishment and launch of a new fund focused on startups in the field of artificial intelligence. Google stated that eligible startups will receive investments from Google and will be able to access Google's exclusive AI large models early, as well as fully configure Google's cloud computing ecosystem, and receive practical technical support from Google's employee team.

In a blog post on Monday, Google stated that through this special fund called the "AI Future Fund," eligible startups will receive investments from Google, access to exclusive AI large models early, and practical support from Google's cloud computing ecosystem, Google AI research team, engineering team, and market expansion experts. They will also receive credit for the Google Cloud platform. Analysts indicated that Google's move aims to explore the "next OpenAI" and seek to master the leading technologies of important AI startups.

The blog post also mentioned, "Some of these startups have the opportunity to seek direct investment from Google to drive revenue growth and expand the scale of AI technology development."

At the launch of this fund, Google is striving to increase its participation in the latest AI startups and AI technology trends; meanwhile, as economic difficulties caused by tariff policies keep the U.S. IPO market and venture capital market sluggish, popular AI startups are also seeking alternative financing channels.

At the same time, Amazon, as well as Microsoft (a major investor in OpenAI) and NVIDIA, are actively supporting more generative AI startups with substantial investments and developing their own innovative artificial intelligence software and hardware technologies.

NVIDIA (NVDA.US), known as the "AI chip leader," is also accelerating its investment pace in AI startups. Since it began investing in 2005, more than half of the tech giant's startup investments have occurred in the past two years.

When NVIDIA invests in AI startups focusing on different application areas, these companies typically allocate most of the investment funds to purchase NVIDIA AI GPUs to build or expand their AI training and inference infrastructure. AI startups require substantial computing resources to train their deep learning models, and NVIDIA's GPUs (such as H100, H200, and Blackwell GPUs) are the industry standard in performance, making the choice of NVIDIA products a natural decision.

In the future, when startups use the AI large models or applications developed by these AI startups, due to their construction and iterative optimization within NVIDIA's ecosystem, these companies will have to continue relying on NVIDIA's full-stack ecosystem's software and hardware collaborative platform during the inference and deployment stages, allowing NVIDIA to further expand its market share through startups.

Earlier this year, Google invested over $1 billion in the generative AI startup Anthropic, known as the "OpenAI rival," which is an additional investment based on previous investments of over $2 billion in Anthropic and holding a 10% stake, as well as a large cloud computing service contract signed between the two parties AI startups are crucial for the development of the global AI industry, especially for 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 underlying AI infrastructure, these AI startups concentrate on various segmented AI application scenarios, which are vital for enhancing operational efficiency for enterprises or improving the work or study efficiency of global end-users. For example, the American AI startup Perplexity AI focuses on the cutting-edge field of "AI search"; the French AI startup Bioptimus focuses on fully integrating cutting-edge AI technology with medical science and biotechnology.

For Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, early investments in these AI startups that heavily rely on cloud computing platforms to develop AI applications may soon yield strong potential returns and incredibly powerful AI application support—similar to the exclusive advantages in GPT large model invocation 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 large model.

The mission section of the fund states: "We strive to work closely with ambitious AI startups at all stages to rapidly achieve breakthrough products and features of a nature from 0 to 1, providing them with early access to Google's state-of-the-art AI large models, AI expertise, and potential funding to help them turn bold AI ideas into reality."