Alphabet lost $270 billion in market value on June 19 as its shares fell nearly 5% after two senior AI researchers left Google for rivals. Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering who helped lead Google's Gemini AI models, announced on June 16 he was joining OpenAI, less than two years after Google secured his return via a $2.7 billion partnership deal involving Character.AI. Three days later, John Jumper, an engineering fellow who helped develop AlphaFold and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced he would leave Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nine years. The departures came shortly after Google unveiled the Gemini 3.5 Flash model and the Gemini Spark AI agent at its I/O developer conference in May. Investors were also reacting to comments from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, published in The Wall Street Journal, suggesting the technology industry should rely less on a handful of AI leaders and that the market was becoming commoditised. Alphabet has raised $141 billion through debt and equity markets since October 2024.