Alphabet Inc. Faces Major Setback as Two AI Leaders Depart, Stock Drops by 5%
On Monday, June 22, 2026, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) experienced its most significant trading downturn in over a year. The tech giant’s stock closed down by approximately 5% following the announcement of two key departures from Google’s artificial intelligence research team. This news led to a staggering loss of an estimated $250 billion in market capitalization.
The initial setback occurred when Noam Shazeer, VP of Engineering and co-lead of Google’s Gemini AI models, revealed his move to OpenAI. Shazeer, a co-author of the influential 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need,” played a crucial role in developing the Transformer architecture that underpins nearly all modern large language models. Despite Google’s $2.7 billion investment in acquiring his startup, Character.AI, in 2024, Shazeer chose to leave less than two years later.
Adding to the investor unease was the announcement of the second departure: John Jumper, VP at Google DeepMind. Jumper, a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate for his co-creation of the AlphaFold protein-folding AI, declared he was moving to Anthropic after a nine-year tenure at Google.
These exits, coupled with investor apprehension over Alphabet’s ambitious $180–$190 billion AI capital expenditure plan for 2026 and a California court’s refusal of a new trial in an addictive-platform lawsuit, triggered a significant drop in shares. However, despite the sell-off, 28 out of 33 analysts continue to rate GOOGL as a Buy, citing a projected 22% revenue growth and a $460 billion cloud backlog.
Source: CNBC — Alphabet Braces for Worst Day in a Year After AI Talent Exits