Why Google could go to US$100 trillion (not hyperbole)

News broke two weeks ago that Google became a US$4 trillion company, making it the second biggest after Nvidia.

Its share price has doubled the past nine months after the prospect of being broken up ended with a highly favourable court ruling.

Now America’s most profitable company, Google has gotten 140 times bigger since it listed on the Nasdaq 22 years ago (in 2004).

It should hardly come as a surprise.  

Android, Chrome and Gmail power 4 - 5 billion devices globally. Search runs 91% of internet searches. YouTube is used by half the world's population every month. Almost 2 billion people use Maps. Google owns the intercontintental fibre optic cables that glue the internet together.

Google is the internet. It's presence is so obvious and ubiquitous that we just fail to see it - much like we fail to see the nose on the end of our face. 

My own view - which I appreciate may sound exaggerated to some - is that Google could become a US$100 trillion company given another 22 years public trading. Making its size by 2048 equal to total global GDP today.

How we got here: Google is the world’s newspaper

Understanding how we got here requires understanding the legacy media.

I'm old enough to remember life before the internet. And remember the days when newspapers and TV stations were very profitable businesses. 

They made money by creating audiences – national audiences for mainstream media; niche and local for trade and regional media – and sold those audiences to advertisers.

Like a newspaper or TV station, Google sells audiences to advertisers. Much like a newspaper, roughly 80% of its revenue comes from advertising.

What Google’s rise has meant for legacy media is by now well known. Robert G Kaiser, the celebrated journalist, wrote a famous essay about exactly this for The Brookings Institute back in 2014, which contained the graph below.

Where Google Search differs from legacy media is that it doesn't really pay the content creators that build its audience. (YouTube does share revenue, however). This imbalance sits behind regulatory efforts such as Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code.

The result is exceptional profitability. While not provided in Google’s shareholder reports, Search is widely believed to operate on gross margins above 60%, and YouTube near 40%, all while delivering low double-digit revenue growth.

It is difficult to see how Google's core advertising business is disrupted. If disruption is market-driven, a competitor would need to build a larger audience and sell it to advertisers more cheaply. Given Google’s data advantage, that outcome looks unlikely.

If government-driven, courts would need to force a 1970s Bell System-style breakup, which appears equally unlikely given the appointment of more business-friendly judges since the 1980s, as Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein notes. 

AI - Google could win it

The next leg up for Google's market cap comes from Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. Its market share surge from 5% last year to 20% today. 

Gemini now outperforms ChatGPT on virtually every benchmark, according to LMArena. This has helped Google’s share price this year.

What excites Wall Street more though is Google’s advantage selling AI - noting revenue growth has been a major concern for ChatGPT. 

Again, there's 4 - 5 billion devices powered by Google. So there's an enormous existing customer base ensuring Google doesn't have the "cold start" problem VC firms hate. 

Adding to this, Google is vertically integrated: owning the AI data centres, AI chips and data itself. This means Google can get costs down - at the same time as it can get revenue up - more than competitors. A double whammy that supports margins. 

Right now, Google is looking to turn Gemini into what gets called "agentic AI" in the jargon. This is when AI starts acting like a Cortana from Halo or a JARVIS from Iron Man - and less like a glorified autocomplete. Demis Hassabis, Google's AI boss, says the firm is still "one or two breakthroughs away". Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, says agentic AI won't come until the 2030s. 

AI agents change the game for Google as it moves the ceiling. Right now Google's growth is capped at global advertising spend, which, while substantial, is in the hundreds of billions. 

Agentic AI allows Google to tap labour spending, which runs into the tens of trillions. If Google captures even 5% of the global labor market, it justifies a valuation that dwarfs today's entire S&P 500.

Self driving cars

The same logic applies to Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit. 

Last year it quietly crossed 14 million paid trips, around three times more than in 2024, and it has done so with a safety record streets ahead of Tesla, its only real competitor. 

Tesla is digging its heals in on camera and radar-only self-driving cars. Musk has refused to use lidar, the laser navigation system that Waymo and Baidu have committed to. His primary concern has been cost. 

This has been a gift to Waymo as cameras struggle with glare, light changes and depth perception as Andrew Miller notes in his new book The End of Driving. These limitations show up clearly in the data. 

California filings from 2023–24 show Waymo had just 0.0004 disengagements per mile, while third-party estimates put Tesla’s at roughly 0.05–0.10 per mile. This safety record creates regulatory goodwill and accelerates Waymo's global rollout in an industry where speed to market is key. 

Lidar costs have fallen too. Waymo has spent years bringing lidar production in-house. This creates a kind of margin-expanding vertical integration like what we're seeing Google do with AI too. 

By 2030, industry estimates suggest lidar fall to $2,000–$3,000 per vehicle. This would largely dissolve the cost advantage of Tesla’s approach.

Then there is Google Maps. With more than two billion monthly users, Maps gives Waymo a built-in storefront and a constant feed of real-time traffic data. When someone searches for directions, Google can simply offer them a Waymo instead. At that point, self-driving cars stop being a science project and start looking like another core Google business.

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