Dive Brief:

• Oracle finance executive Kobi Bar-Nathan took the role of CFO for Google Cloud, effective this month, according to his LinkedIn profile. A five-year alum of Oracle, Bar-Nathan most recently served as the software provider’s CFO and SVP finance, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
• The appointment comes after Google Cloud revenues skyrocketed by 28% during Google parent Alphabet’s most recent quarter, according to earnings results published in April.
• Revenues for the segment hit $12.3 billion for the quarter ended March 31, led by growth in Google Cloud Platform core and AI-related products which was “much higher than Cloud's overall revenue growth rate,” Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during the company’s earnings call.

Dive Insight:

An experienced financial executive in the cloud industry, Bar-Nathan’s past experience includes 10 years at Microsoft, serving in such roles as finance director, Microsoft Cloud Infrastructure and group finance manager, cloud and enterprise COGs, according to his LinkedIn. He also served a seven-year tenure at Intel as a finance manager and in roles at the company’s semiconductor fabricators in Israel.

Bar-Nathan’s appointment comes as rising demand for AI infrastructure drives up competition in the cloud industry— fueling a rush in data center spending from top players including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Meta. Those four companies accounted for 44% of data center capital investments for the first quarter of the year, as Q1 data center capital expenditures rose by 53% year-over-year to reach $153 billion, CFO Dive sister publication CIO Dive previously reported.

Altogether, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft plan to invest over $250 billion in such buildouts this year to help meet expanding AI processing power demands, CIO Dive reported.

For the company’s first quarter, Alphabet reported $17.2 billion in capital expenditures, “primarily reflecting investment in our technical infrastructure, with the largest component being investment in servers, followed by data centers to support the growth of our business across Google Services, Google Cloud, and Google DeepMind,” CFO Ashkenazi said during the company’s earnings call, according to a transcript.

The company expects its jump in capex over the past few years to put continued pressure “on the P&L, primarily in the form of higher depreciation,” Ashkenazi said during the call. “In the first quarter, we saw 31% year-on-year growth in depreciation from the increase in technical infrastructure assets placed in service.”

The jump in AI spending also comes as the industry looks to navigate continued tariff uncertainty and regulatory changes that could impact its potential future growth. President Donald Trump’s back-and-forth on potential tariffs that could be levied against foreign semiconductor imports — the chips that drive AI processes — has sparked unease inside the tech industry, as well as in other spaces that rely on such chips, including the automotive space, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.