Next Google-Style Asymmetrical Opportunity
Google was an AI loser… until it wasn’t. The stock I’m diving into today carries that same label on the surface, but underneath it’s positioning itself to become one of the biggest winners.
When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, the reaction inside Google was famously called a “Code Red.” This was a historic moment… that corporate panic is critical to understanding the company’s subsequent turnaround.
For a company that owned the internet, YouTube, and endless amounts of data, Google was suddenly widely perceived as the biggest loser in the new AI race. Why? Mainly because of ChatGPT. The market + the media quickly established three powerful narratives that framed Google as an AI loser:
The “New Google”: OpenAI (backed by Microsoft) launched ChatGPT, immediately posing a major threat to Google’s $150+ billion Search advertising business. User growth exploded and the app went viral… it was the general publics real “first” true experience with AI. Everyone you know was talking about ChatGPT, it reminded me a lot of when Facebook launched back in the day. If you didn’t know what ChatGPT was you were living under a rock. The narrative was simple: why click links and search using clunky, archaic Google when ChatGPT can just give you the answer? I can just ask this app anything in the world and it tells me what I want or need? Analysts and the public feared the loss of Search’s dominance.
Execution: Remember Bard? The horribly named ChatGPT clone? The launch event was even riddled with errors and was widely ridiculed and mocked on social media. The demonstration famously got a factual question about the James Webb Space Telescope wrong… it was a mess. Later attempts to integrate AI into Search led to further blunders and even more ridicule. These mistakes were seen as evidence of a massive company caught flatfooted, offguard, and too slow to compete with the new, exciting, rapidly growing OpenAI.
Focus: Many argued that while Google had world leading research (DeepMind) its AI efforts were entirely focused internally on optimizing things like Search and Google Photos, improving ad targeting, and managing data centers with TPUs. The big blunder was failing to launch a powerful and polished consumer product. This allowed ChatGPT to break away and take a commanding lead.
The consensus was that Google had grown too complacent about its long held technological advantage which allowed a startup to define the decade’s most important technology. Google’s turnaround was not built on a single launch but on a massive, rapid internal restructuring designed to leverage its unmatched assets. The goal was to unify its scattered AI efforts and weaponize its core hardware advantage.
Unification: Google centralized its two competing AI teams under Google DeepMind. This eliminated internal friction and directed Google’s best researchers toward a single goal: building the best AI.
Gemini: Google followed up the awful Bard model with the renamed and more appropriate Gemini. Gemini was immediately marketed as being multimodal from the ground up (handling text, images, video, and code natively) and rapidly closed the perceived performance gap with GPT-4. This powerful product launch stole back the performance narrative and proved Google’s research superiority was intact.
TPUs: Google publicly began offering its custom designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) chips it developed specifically for its own internal AI training to Google Cloud customers. The first legitimate swipe at Nvidia. This offered a “Custom Chip Advantage” and provided a high performance, cost effective alternative to Nvidia for major enterprises.
AI Everywhere: Rather than keeping AI as just a separate chatbot, Google wove Gemini into all of its core products: AI Overviews (providing instant answers in Search), YouTube, Gmail, and deep integration into Android and all of Google Workspace. This proved that Google’s goal was not just to win the chat bot war, but to win the entire AI platform war.
The result was a complete reversal of AI positioning and as a result, market sentiment. Over the last few months, the narrative shifted from “AI will kill Google Search” to “Google is the only company positioned to win the entire AI stack.” From chips (TPUs) to research (DeepMind) to distribution (Search, YouTube, Android, Waymo). The stock rallied, and the “AI loser” stigma was definitively lifted. Google’s resurgence is a blueprint for how a giant perceived to be eclipsed by competition can regain it’s leadership position by leveraging deeply entrenched non replicable assets, data, and infrastructure.
This brings us to the next company facing a similar market skepticism.
In this article, I’m breaking down the company that I think sits in almost the exact same spot Google was in over the last year or so. I think this stock is a perceived AI loser but presents immense upside opportunity over the next decade with potential to go up multiples of where it is right now. The company has multiple cash flowing verticals, stellar financials, and a brand everyone knows.