---
title: "Gemini enters wartime management! Google centralizes AI command chain to Mountain View, Silicon Valley as the $205 billion AI gamble enters the realization phase"
type: "News"
locale: "en"
url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/295044246.md"
description: "In response to concerns about competition from Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as the loss of core talent, Google has centralized its AI business leadership at its Mountain View headquarters in Silicon Valley. Koray Kavukcuoglu is responsible for AI research and operations, while Demis Hassabis has stepped down from daily duties to serve as chairman and chief scientist. This move aims to streamline the decision-making chain to accelerate the iteration of Gemini, but the market reaction has led to a decline in stock prices of over 4%"
datetime: "2026-08-06T02:28:04.000Z"
locales:
  - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/295044246.md)
  - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/295044246.md)
  - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/295044246.md)
---

# Gemini enters wartime management! Google centralizes AI command chain to Mountain View, Silicon Valley as the $205 billion AI gamble enters the realization phase

According to Zhitong Finance APP, American tech giant Google (GOOGL.US) is consolidating the leadership of its artificial intelligence business unit at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, to gain stronger momentum in the increasingly accelerated competition of AI large models and agents against Anthropic and OpenAI, vying for the forefront of the world's most dominant artificial intelligence technologies. This move by Google comes as the market worries that the departure of "AI veteran" Jeff Dean, along with senior employees Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, will weaken the continuity of updates for Google's flagship AI technology, Gemini, leading to a more than 4% drop in Google's stock price on Wednesday.

The tech giant has appointed Koray Kavukcuoglu, who relocated to Mountain View over the past year, to oversee its vast AI research and operations system. This highlights Google's urgent state of compressing decision-making chains and centralizing AI daily operations in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, under pressure from model delays, core talent loss, and competition from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Meanwhile, DeepMind co-founder and long-time CEO Demis Hassabis has stepped back from daily operations to serve as chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Sebastian Borgeaud, who is responsible for a key AI programming project, has also moved from the UK to California. Additionally, some individuals have completely left the company's London headquarters.

**Google's AI Power Center Returns to Silicon Valley: Gemini Fully Assembles in California, Facing Off Against OpenAI and Anthropic**

Google's efforts to centralize its AI leadership aim to reverse a trend that has plagued the company since at least 2023. That year, Google merged two previously independent and highly regarded scientific laboratories: one based at the company's Mountain View headquarters, Google Brain, and the other rooted in London, DeepMind. Although the two labs merged under the name Google DeepMind, researchers continued to work on different continents. According to insiders, this arrangement complicated the decision-making process and left talent in both locations dissatisfied.

As Kavukcuoglu officially takes over Google's AI ambitions, the company is significantly lagging behind competitors in the AI application race. The release schedule for the strongest version of its flagship AI model is months behind plan; in one of the earliest applications of AI that achieved high commercial value—the AI programming automation market—many believe Google's product resembles an afterthought.

Dissatisfaction among researchers regarding Google's competitive position has intensified, triggering a wave of departures to start new ventures—including legendary Google engineer Jeff Dean—and recently, talent has been increasingly moving to Anthropic and OpenAI. These competitors not only allow talent to be at the forefront of AI technology but also offer substantial wealth opportunities from upcoming initial public offerings At the same time, Google has committed to investing up to $205 billion in capital expenditures this year alone to support its artificial intelligence ambitions, putting immense pressure on Kavutkcioglu to deliver results quickly.

Some of the company's departing personnel include senior staff from the DeepMind London office. David Silver, a distinguished researcher at the office, left earlier this year to found a new AI startup called Ineffable Intelligence, which secured $1.1 billion in seed funding. According to a source familiar with the matter, DeepMind's Chief Experience Officer Simon Bouton also plans to leave to join the London-based startup CuspAI. Bouton has been with the company for 13 years and was responsible for overseeing operations. Bouton did not immediately respond to media requests for comment.

Google stated that London remains a crucial hub for the company's AI talent and strategic ambitions. The company recently opened a new office building in London, where Hassabis will continue to focus on AI vision and strategy.

These adjustments over the past year mean that many key AI leaders driving the development of the Gemini model are now concentrated in the same location. Gemini is at the core of Google's AI strategy.

Since the onset of the AI boom, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin have frequently appeared on a floor dedicated to Gemini employees, but according to an internal Google employee, Hassabis is rarely seen there. Over time, oversight of Gemini has gradually shifted to Kavutkcioglu.

The new arrangement is also reflected in Brin's description of his role in Google's AI work. In June of this year, at an event aimed at AI researchers and industry leaders, Brin was asked how he collaborates with Kavutkcioglu and Hassabis. Brin stated that he is deeply involved in the Gemini project and works closely with Kavutkcioglu.

Brin said, "I would say I constantly poke and prod him and the team, like asking, 'Hey, are you really doing that thing?' Sometimes it can indeed be a bit disruptive, I won't deny it. But Kavutkcioglu is really responsible for organizing the various teams and ensuring they deliver perfect results."

As a long-time leader at DeepMind, Kavutkcioglu created the deep learning team and pioneered several significant research breakthroughs within the company. Compared to Hassabis, he has remained relatively low-key but has quietly risen through the ranks of DeepMind's leadership in recent years. Last summer, Kavutkcioglu was promoted to Google's Chief AI Architect.

Deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun served as Kavutkcioglu's mentor during his PhD studies at New York University. LeCun described him as "an outstanding engineer" and noted that he "cultivated excellent research management skills" during his rise at DeepMind. LeCun also added that Kavutkcioglu's early research helped people believe that AI could fundamentally change the way machines process language Currently, as Google faces the aftermath of several high-profile AI leaders' departures, the task ahead is extremely challenging. Kavutkcioglu is the only remaining senior co-lead of Gemini still at Google.

**Google Rapidly Centralizes AI Command Chain, Battling AI Programming Agents and Enterprise AI**

The primary focus of Google's future business strategy is to transform the "research federation" that was previously scattered between London’s DeepMind and California’s Google Brain traditional systems into a delivery machine for Gemini products, centered in Mountain View and directly accountable to Pichai. Kavutkcioglu's dual role overseeing the daily operations of Google DeepMind and serving as Chief AI Architect means that model pre-training, post-training, evaluation, computing power scheduling, and collaboration with Cloud, Search, and developer products will be integrated into a shorter decision-making chain; Hassabis will transition to Chairman of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, focusing on AGI strategy, social impact, and Isomorphic Labs.

These latest personnel adjustments are not intended to weaken fundamental research but rather to separate the management of "long-term scientific exploration" and "quarterly product delivery," attempting to address the slow decision-making and commercialization of research results that have plagued cross-continental teams since the merger in 2023.

The second strategic focus is to concentrate resources to address the shortcomings in cutting-edge models, AI programming, and agent execution capabilities, upgrading Gemini from a single chat model to a foundational operating system that spans the entire Google stack. Gemini 3.5 Pro was delayed for several months from its originally scheduled June release due to programming capabilities not meeting internal targets, indicating that Google's most pressing need is not to continue stacking general benchmark scores but to enhance code generation, complex tool invocation, long-term task planning, and enterprise-level reliability; meanwhile, the company has already initiated large-scale pre-training for Gemini 4 and is covering developer and enterprise scenarios through the Antigravity agent development platform, CodeMender security agent, and Flash low-cost models.

Google's current true AI business goal is to embed the same set of model capabilities simultaneously into Google Search, Ads, Workspace, Android, Google Cloud, and Vertex AI, allowing a single model development investment to be monetized repeatedly across billions of consumer and enterprise clients, rather than allowing OpenAI and Anthropic to define high-value AI applications first.

The third focus is to convert unprecedented AI capital expenditures into enterprise AI cloud computing revenue, search increments, and verifiable capital returns. Google's parent company Alphabet has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to $195 billion to $205 billion, with second-quarter capital expenditures reaching $44.9 billion, resulting in a $5.9 billion outflow of free cash flow; however, Google Cloud's cloud computing revenue also saw a significant year-on-year increase of 82% to $24.8 billion, with backlogged orders reaching $514 billion, and nearly 90% of the Fortune 100 companies have adopted Gemini Enterprise, with model API processing volumes reaching approximately 22 billion tokens per minute This also highlights that Google's future growth path is not simply focused on "large models," but rather reconstructing the company's growth trajectory around a vertically integrated path of "self-developed TPU and high-performance network infrastructure—Gemini large model—cloud computing enterprise platform—Google search engine and advertising commercialization—Waymo and AI pharmaceuticals."

For investors, centralized organization increases the execution ceiling, but the continuous loss of core talent also amplifies the risks of single-point decision-making and innovation gaps. Therefore, the investment verification indicators surrounding Google will no longer just be model rankings, but whether the Gemini release schedule can be accelerated, whether programming and intelligent agent market shares can be increased, whether Cloud backlog orders can be converted into cloud computing revenue, whether AI + search engine can maintain advertising monetization, and whether high capital expenditures can be transformed back into positive free cash flow

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