Alphabet shares are falling for a second day as investors react to John Jumper leaving Google DeepMind. On Monday, the stock dropped 5% to $349.56, marking Alphabet’s biggest one-day percentage loss in over a year and wiping out about $225 billion in market value, according to Dow Jones Market Data. This was the largest single-day market cap loss in the company’s history. The stock was down more than 2% again in premarket trading on Tuesday as the broader tech selloff continued. Here is what Jumper’s exit means and why analysts believe it is a major event.
Jumper helped create AlphaFold, DeepMind’s AI system that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences and won him a Nobel Prize. On Friday, he announced on social media that he is leaving Google DeepMind after nine years to join Anthropic. Alphabet confirmed he is leaving, and Anthropic said Jumper will join them but did not comment on other hiring plans.
Wedbush Securities called Jumper’s departure a major loss and said he played a key role in the AI boom, which is why investors reacted strongly. D.A. Davidson pointed out that both Jumper and Noam Shazeer, who recently left Google’s Gemini team for OpenAI, are leaving at the same time. This raises concerns that Google is losing top AI talent. The analyst also noted that Google briefly had the leading AI model last year, but these exits suggest it may now be falling further behind.
Competition for talent in the AI industry is intense. Some pay packages now reach hundreds of millions of dollars, and buying startups just to hire their teams has become common. This month, both Anthropic and OpenAI announced plans to go public, which means they now need to attract investors as well as top researchers.
