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# Google

2026-08-06

AlphaGo's Demis Hassabis Steps Back From Running DeepMind Day-to-Day — and Google's Chief Scientist Walks Out the Same Day With Three Others

On August 5 Google announced that Demis Hassabis is becoming chair of Google DeepMind and handing off day-to-day operations. Alphabet fell more than 5%. Everyone talked about that. The same day carried another item almost nobody looked at closely: Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist and 27-year veteran, left to start a company — taking Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals with him. Sanjay's name means little to most readers, yet he and Dean are the only two level 11 Senior Fellows Google has had in twenty-odd years, and they spent those years writing code hunched over the same computer. What Dean built in 27 years was all foundation: search index scaled 100×, Google's first ads system, MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, TensorFlow, the TPU program. That operating system assumes you have time to build foundations — and Google just moved the clock forward. Stranger still: Google didn't push him out. It invested in his new company and wants to sell him cloud.

2026-08-05

Why Is Google Guaranteeing $43.8B of Other People's Data Center Rent? TPU Operators Borrow at 7.1%, Nvidia's at 9.3%

There's a number in Alphabet's Q2 2026 10-Q: as of June 30, Google had committed to cover up to $43.8 billion in third-party data center lease payments if tenants default. Nine months earlier that figure was $6.5 billion — a sevenfold increase. None of those data centers are Google's. What the guarantee buys is very concrete: with Alphabet standing behind them, operators running Google TPUs borrow at 7.1% while comparable projects in Nvidia's ecosystem pay 9.3% — a structural 2.2-point gap. At the other end of the chain sits Anthropic: run-rate revenue just past $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, but with no credit rating and no way to borrow at this scale on its own. In between stand Morgan Stanley's Compute SPV, Broadcom as residual-value guarantor, and crypto miners supplying grid power. This piece takes apart how the machine works, why Google would rather keep $43.8B of exposure off its balance sheet, and the path the risk travels back.