Google CEO Sundar Pichai (순다르 피차이) said the shift to artificial intelligence has increased startup investment opportunities, CNBC reported on Monday.

In a conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison (존 콜리슨), Pichai mentioned SpaceX and Anthropic. He said the AI transition has created more opportunities to deploy capital effectively and that Google is doing so.

Alphabet has invested in startups through early-stage investment arm GV and growth-stage investment arm CapitalG. As AI companies increasingly need hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, Alphabet is also expanding large direct investments using its financial statements rather than a venture-capital approach, like Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon.

SpaceX is cited as a leading example. Alphabet invested $900 million in 2015 at an enterprise value of about $12 billion. If Alphabet had kept that stake, its current value is estimated at about $100 billion after SpaceX merged with Elon Musk's xAI in February in a $1.25 trillion deal. SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering last week and is said to be pursuing a valuation of $1.75 trillion.

Anthropic is also part of the same trend. Anthropic competes with OpenAI in the AI model market, while also partnering with Google to buy billions of dollars worth of Google's tensor processing units and cloud infrastructure. Google invested $300 million in Anthropic in 2023 to secure about a 10 percent stake, then added another $2 billion a few months later. Including additional funding since then, its cumulative investment has exceeded $3 billion, and its stake is said to be about 14 percent. Anthropic's valuation rose to $380 billion as of February.

Pichai also stressed capital efficiency. He said he wants to be an entity that manages capital well and that when he judges returns on invested capital to be high, he wants to put in as much money as possible. He also rated the Stripe investment as an example of good capital management. GV joined Stripe's $150 million funding round in 2016, and CapitalG is also an investor. Stripe's valuation was $159 billion as of February, more than 17 times higher than when GV invested.

Pichai also mentioned Waymo. Waymo raised $2.25 billion in its first external funding round in 2020, and earlier this year it was valued at $126 billion in a $16 billion fundraising. Alphabet also contributed funding alongside outside investors. Pichai said he wanted to invest more capital in Waymo earlier, but it was not at that level of maturity at the time.