As the Silicon Valley ‘AI talent war’ escalates into a multi-billion dollar bidding power struggle, Google has successfully deployed a ‘boomerang’ strategy to bring its top minds back to the company. While rivals like Meta and OpenAI are offering astronomical signing bonuses as mush as $100 million, Google is winning back its former staffers with a different kind of currency: Robust computational infrastructure.Citing data, CNBC reported that approximately 20% of AI software engineers hired by Google in 2025 were former employees. This suggests that for the world’s elite engineers, the ability to build is becoming more valuable than a massive immediate paychecks.
Google has deep pockets and computational infrastructure
The report also said that during a recent internal meeting, Google’s head of compensation, John Casey, addressed the trend directly, noting that AI researchers are increasingly drawn back to Google’s “deep pockets” and its unparalleled “hefty computational infrastructure.”Google is uniquely positioned as an “all-in-one” provider with its own Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a Cloud to host AI models, and even products to help it infuse its AI services, giving it an edge that cash alone cannot buy.“We’re energized by our momentum, compute and talent. Engineers want to work here to keep building groundbreaking products,” a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying.Apart from salary and infrastructure, Google has spent months in eliminating over one-third of middle-management roles to speed up product shipping. Co-founder Sergey Brin came out of retirement to personally call and recruit top-tier candidates. More recently, the success of Gemini 3 has provided the company an edge after a rocky start in 2022.Recently, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who is the co-founder of DeepMind, also acknowledged the shortage of AI talent, saying that this has led to a constant “rotation” of experts between the “Big Five” tech firms.
