While many other technology giants embrace the metaverse as the next frontier of growth, Alphabet Inc chief executive officer Sundar Pichai sees Google’s future in its oldest offering: Internet search.
“I feel fortunate our mission is timeless,” Pichai said in an interview in Singapore. “There’s more need to organize information than ever before.”
Earlier this month, Google parent Alphabet briefly crossed US$2 trillion in market value thanks to sales and profit growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo: AFP
When asked where the next US$1 trillion would come from, Pichai pointed to his company’s core service.
People will ask computers more questions with voice and “multimodal experiences,” he said. “Being able to adapt to all that and evolve search will continue to be the biggest opportunity.”
Since taking over Google in 2015, Pichai has pushed the company deeper into cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), while facing an increase in regulatory scrutiny.
In the interview, Pichai ticked off Google’s key growth businesses — cloud, the YouTube video service and its app store — and said AI investments were “underlying” each of them.
The India-born CEO also said he expects that more of Google’s products would be developed and tested in Asia first, before spreading across the globe.
Not in China, though.
After icing plans to bring search to China in 2018, following an employee uproar, Google has kept most of its services out of the nation.
“I don’t see that changing,” Pichai said.
However, he does not share other Silicon Valley executives’ dim view of China’s tech advances.
Pichai acknowledged that Google is “neck to neck” with Chinese companies in AI and quantum computing, but argued that the US and China have room to collaborate in areas such as climate change and AI safety.
Some of Google’s largest peers, such as Microsoft Corp and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc, have pitched their futures around the virtual worlds of the metaverse.
Google has taken several approaches at virtual and augmented reality products, with limited success.
Years ago, its first attempt, the Google Glass headgear, flopped.
Google recently placed these efforts in a new division reporting to Pichai, although he did not provide specifics about the strategy.
“I’ve always been excited about the future of immersive computing,” he said. “This doesn’t belong to any company. This is the evolution of the Internet.”
Promoters of the metaverse often talk about the potential to build in new technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
Aside from some cloud partnerships, Google has largely steered clear of this part of the industry.
Pichai said he does not own any cryptocurrency.
“I wish I did,” he said. “I’ve dabbled in it, you know, in and out.”
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS