Google loses $270 billion, how resignation of two employees led to Google's 'worst day' in 2026 on stock market
Google-parent company Alphabet suffered its worst day on the stock market in over a year, losing roughly $270 billion in market value as artificial intelligence (AI) panic mounted following the sudden exit of two high-profile AI researchers. Shares of the company tumbled approximately 5%. The compan
By Toi Tech Desk
Google-parent company Alphabet suffered its worst day on the stock market in over a year, losing roughly $270 billion in market value as artificial intelligence (AI) panic mounted following the sudden exit of two high-profile AI researchers.
Shares of the company tumbled approximately 5%.
The company’s elite AI divisions suffered back-to-back departures to chief rivals.Noam Shazeer and John Jumper quit Google DeepMindThe first blow came on June 16, when Noam Shazeer, who served as Google’s vice president of engineering and the co-lead of its flagship Gemini AI models, announced he was leaving the company to join top competitor OpenAI.
Shazeer’s exit comes less than two years after Google spent $2.7 billion to bring him back.
In August 2024, Google had signed a major partnership with Character.AI – a startup Shazeer co-founded – to recruit him and fellow researcher Daniel De Freitas back into its DeepMind AI unit.The second exit was on June 19, when Nobel Prize winner John Jumper announced he was leaving Google DeepMind after nine years to join another primary rival, Anthropic.
Jumper, an engineering fellow who won the Nobel Prize in 2024 alongside DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, is famous as the co-creator of AlphaFold.The high-profile departures arrived just weeks after Google had confidently showcased its latest technology, including the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and its new Gemini Spark AI agent, at its annual I/O developer conference.The talent exodus compounded broader investor anxieties sparked by comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
In an interview published by The Wall Street Journal, Nadella called for the tech industry to reduce its dependence on “AI Giants” and suggested that the AI market was fast becoming commoditised.This appears to have directly challenged Alphabet's current financial strategy as the company has been spending aggressively to dominate the sector, raising $141 billion in debt and equity since October to build out a vertically integrated AI infrastructure.Get the latest technology news and updates.
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