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JH Jordi Hays Jordi Hays Co-founder and host of TBPN, a daily technology talk show covering startup news, funding rounds and the businesses behind Silicon Valley.

“If you think AI is real and going to be big, it's very, very hard to make a super coherent bear case on Google. Even if search revenues decline every year and we're sort of at peak search, they just have so many other assets, and they can use that search cash flow to finance so much other infrastructure and M&A.”

TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“If you think AI is real and going to be big, it's very, very hard to make a super coherent bear case on Google. Even if search revenues decline every year and we're sort of at peak search, they just have so many other assets, and they can use that search cash flow to finance so much other infrastructure and M&A.” — Jordi Hays, TBPN

Context

After a bearish take that AI Mode is hurting Google's search traffic and publishers, Hays argues that Google's cash flow and other assets, such as cloud, TPUs and AI stakes, outweigh any search decline.

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Transcript

TBPN Around 07:27 into the episode
Jordi Hays

…because we do have a date November 12th. The TVPN merch store is going to be gone live. It will be released first into the YouTube chat and it will sit there. I'm assuming we'll leave it there for like 10 minutes so the chat can feast and then we'll post it publicly over on X and everywhere else.

John Coogan

…frustrated. And it can be kind of an annoying funnel because you wind up in AI mode and then you're like kind of trying to click somewhere and it can be sort of jarring. It just requires a new flow to get into. I don't know. What's your overall thinking on Google these days, Jordy? Dylan Patel.

Jordi Hays

I just think if you think AI, I think if you think AI is real and going to be big, it's very, very hard to make a super coherent bear case, right? Even if search revenues, even if search revenues decline every year and we're sort of at peak search, they just have so many other assets and they can use that search cash flow to finance so much other infrastructure and MA and things like that.

John Coogan

I mean, people are nervous about it, but it's still $200 billion. So effectively, I mean, that's revenue, but it's high margin revenue that they can deploy elsewhere. And I mean, the take him take is that in the race to win AI builders, Anthropic and OpenAI now account for 86% of enterprise LLM API…

Jordi Hays

revenue is flowing through GCP. It's paying for TPUs, right? So it's like Google's getting their, Google's getting their cut, right?

John Coogan

100%.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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