Alphabet Shares Fall 7% After Two AI Researchers Depart for Rivals

Alphabet shares fell as much as 7% on Monday after two senior AI researchers departed Google for rival firms, New York Post reported. Senior research scientist and Nobel Prize winner John Jumper announced late Friday that he was leaving Google DeepMind for a role at Anthropic. Days earlier, Noam Shazeer, co-lead of Google’s Gemini AI models, joined OpenAI.

The stock decline threatened to erase $270 billion in Alphabet market value in a single day. As of midday trading, the shares were on pace for their worst finish in a year. Meta shares fell 2% and Amazon shares fell about 4% on the same session.

Google has signaled plans to spend $180 billion to $190 billion in fiscal 2026, much of it for AI compute and data centers. Gil Lauria, head of tech research at DA Davidson, stated that the departures raise concern Google is losing the war for talent at the frontier of AI. He added that Google had the state-of-the-art model for a few weeks last year but has fallen off since.

Dave Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors stated the market is drawing a sharp line between AI spenders and AI earners. He noted that big spending hurts hyperscalers’ margins while hardware orders benefit memory manufacturers, and that the loss of key AI research to a close competitor did not help Google.