Ben Thompson
Aug 18, 2026 Bullish
Google's AI bar is low -- it just needs Search not to die too fast.
"Google just needs search to not die too quickly."
12 month horizon
Aug 18, 2026 Bullish
Thompson casts Search as See's Candies and AI as Google's BNSF: lower margin, far bigger absolute profit.
will we look back on Google search like See's Candies? It feels like that's what's happening.
12 month horizon
Aug 18, 2026 Bullish
Thompson reads Google's equity issuance as confidence, not weakness: a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.
Well, you have the smaller percentage of an astronomically larger pie. At the end of the day, no one's gonna be complaining.
12 month horizon
Aug 18, 2026 Bullish
Thompson names Google (with Amazon) as Nvidia's real long-term competitor, citing its equity-funding edge.
Google can just issue equity. Shareholders don't love it, but their monetization capacity is much higher than Nvidia or Nvidia's customers are.
12 month horizon
Aug 18, 2026 Bearish
Thompson won't call Google a frontier lab: OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly there, Google is unclear.
I think OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly on the frontier. Who knows what's happening with Google
12 month horizon
Nov 25, 2025 Bullish
Google is pitching Meta and large institutions on buying/hosting TPUs directly, not just renting via GCP.
Ben's read: "shocking but not surprising" — incremental TPU sales let Google amortize TPU development costs over more units
25 month horizon
Nov 19, 2025 Bullish
Gemini 3 launch makes Google the biggest winner: full TPU-to-app stack, lowest cost, priced above GPT-5.1.
Google = biggest winner: full TPU→model→app vertical integration (the structure Ben expects to win early in a new tech paradigm), massive cash flow, lowest cost structure among leading model makers via in-house TPUs.
12 month horizon
Nov 10, 2025 Bullish
Apple to pay Google ~$1B/yr for a custom Gemini model to power Siri, despite Anthropic scoring better.
Siri white-labels Gemini: Apple finalizing a deal to pay Google ~$1B/year for a custom 1.2T-parameter Gemini model to power a rebuilt Siri
12 month horizon
Nov 3, 2025 Bullish
Thompson on Google's raised capex guide: the rational response is to wish it had invested even more, sooner.
Ben's stance, explicit and bullish on Google's capex: the "rational response" to the capex raise isn't concern, it's to wish Google had invested more sooner, even accounting for a 41% rise in depreciation expense.
12 month horizon
Sep 23, 2025 Bullish
Thompson's most bullish Google piece: YouTube's AI auto-tagging makes 'every pixel monetizable.'
he calls this making "every pixel monetizable."
12 month horizon
Sep 16, 2025 Bullish
pairing a frontier model (Gemini) with in-house silicon (TPUs) uniquely favors Google over Big Tech peers.
This structurally favors Google, uniquely among Big Tech, because it pairs a competitive frontier model (Gemini) with its own custom silicon (TPUs) — an integrated model+chip strategy that neither Amazon (no leading model) nor Apple (no chip strategy at this scale) can currently match.
12 month horizon