After a challenging start to 2025 that saw investors question Google’s ability to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alphabet delivered its strongest annual stock performance since 2009. Much of the resurgence has been driven by DeepMind, the London-based lab Google acquired in 2014 for roughly £400 million. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis described his team as “the engine room” of Google’s AI efforts, crediting organizational changes made in 2023—most notably the merger of Google Brain into DeepMind—for establishing the infrastructure and processes to ship new AI features across Google products at an accelerated pace.

Hassabis revealed that he and Google CEO Sundar Pichai speak every day to align on product roadmaps, resource allocation and strategic pivots. Those conversations, he said, allow both executives to adjust development plans on a daily basis in response to competitive moves by OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and others. Investors have taken note: since the launch of the CNBC podcast The Tech Download in mid-2025, during which Hassabis first disclosed the cadence of his calls with Pichai, Alphabet’s forward P/E multiple has expanded by more than 15%, reflecting growing confidence in the company’s agility.

DeepMind’s AI backbone has supported the rapid succession of Gemini model launches—version 2.5 in March 2025 and version 3.0 in November—each praised for improvements in speed and reliability. Hassabis highlighted that these models can now be deployed across Google Search, Workspace and Ads within weeks rather than months. Early data from internal use cases show that AI-driven search summaries have increased engagement metrics by 8% quarter-over-quarter, while AI-powered ad targeting has driven a 10% lift in click-through rates since Gemini integration began.

With veteran technologists calling today’s AI race the most intense environment they have ever seen, Google is sharpening its focus on delivering both incremental product enhancements and breakthrough innovations. Hassabis emphasized that while many labs can catch up to existing capabilities, true leadership will require pushing “beyond the frontier” to develop entirely new model architectures. That pursuit of so-called artificial general intelligence remains Google’s north star, and investors will be watching whether the daily executive alignment and DeepMind’s “engine room” approach can sustain the company’s regained momentum through 2026 and beyond.