Overview
- Alphabet shares fell about 6–7% on Monday, June 22, wiping out roughly $250–270 billion of market value in one session and marking one of the stock’s largest single‑day declines in over a year.
- Two high‑profile departures drove the reaction: Noam Shazeer, a Gemini co‑lead and former Transformer co‑author, said he is joining OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper confirmed he is leaving DeepMind to join Anthropic.
- Both Alphabet and Anthropic officially confirmed Jumper’s move and analysts warned the back‑to‑back exits raise doubts about Google’s ability to retain top AI researchers who build frontier models.
- Investors also flagged the scale of Alphabet’s planned 2026 capital spending—reported roughly in the $175–190 billion range—and recent large equity and debt raises as amplifying concerns that infrastructure buildout may outpace near‑term monetization.
- The selloff rippled across big tech while memory and chip suppliers such as Micron gained, and market watchers say the next signs to watch are further talent flows, any change to capex plans, and near‑term free‑cash‑flow and product progress at Gemini and Google Cloud.