Shares of Alphabet, Google's parent company, ended over 5% lower on Monday as investors reacted to the departure of two top AI researchers, Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, for other firms. Jumper left for Anthropic while Shazeer will join OpenAI less than two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to bring him back. The fall came even as Google's profits are accelerating almost four times faster. On a forward earnings basis, Google's stock is 22% cheaper than Apple. First quarter free cash flow fell 47% to $10.1 billion. Google's price action points towards a $180 billion to $190 billion 2026 capex guide, which has unsettled investors, as much of that spending will be earmarked for AI compute and data centres. Google's fall outpaced rivals Meta and Amazon, which fell about 2% and 4%, respectively. The slide also came after a Wall Street Journal interview with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who suggested the US should avoid dependence on a few big AI models and noted that if models become cheaper and more interchangeable, investors could question whether AI spending is a durable advantage.