Alphabet shares fall 7% as Gemini co-lead and AlphaFold chief exit to OpenAI, Anthropic

Alphabet (GOOGL) stock fell as much as 7% on June 22, 2026—its worst day in a year—triggered by back-to-back departures of two of the company's most prominent AI researchers. Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and co-lead of Google's Gemini models, announced his move to OpenAI on June 18. Two days later, John Jumper, DeepMind vice president and 2024 Nobel laureate for AlphaFold, announced his departure to Anthropic.

The exits rattled investors already spooked by Alphabet's massive capital expenditure guidance. The company raised its full-year 2026 capex forecast to $180–$190 billion—six times its 2022 level and double 2025 spending—and upsized a previously announced equity raise to $84.75 billion. Free cash flow fell 47% year-over-year in Q1 to $10.1 billion, with consensus estimates projecting FCF of only ~$20.5 billion for the full year, down 72% from $73.3 billion in 2025.

Shazeer is a co-author of the foundational 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. Google spent $2.7 billion in 2024 to bring him back via the Character.AI acquisition; he is departing less than two years later. Jumper co-created AlphaFold, which has predicted over 200 million protein structures, and had spent nine years at Google DeepMind.

For architects evaluating cloud strategy and AI infrastructure plays, the selloff highlights investor anxieties around the unit economics of AI capex. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's recent comments that the AI market is becoming commoditized—meaning lower pricing power and returns on massive chip spending—have weighed on the entire sector. The departures suggest internal momentum questions in Alphabet's model race at a moment when it is spending record sums to defend its position.