'Google' CEO Sells Some Shares Amid Expanded AI Investments and Receives New RSUs

Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL/GOOG) disclosed on March 4 that CEO Sundar Pichai sold approximately 32,500 Class C common shares in the open market under a pre-established Rule 10b5-1 trading plan, generating roughly $10 million in cash (about KRW 13 billion). On the same day, the board’s Compensation Committee granted Pichai several hundred thousand new restricted stock units (RSUs) that vest monthly through January 2029. Earlier, on January 13, President and CIO Ruth Porat and President of Global Affairs John Kent Walker saw their performance-based PSUs under the 2021 equity incentive plan vest at 200% of target, resulting in the issuance of roughly 90,000 Class C shares each—securing performance awards worth several billion KRW. Those awards were settled as equity grants, not open-market purchases or discretionary sales, and an Amended Form 4 filing corrected an initial underreporting of the shares acquired to reflect the true amounts.

In its Q4 2025 earnings release, Alphabet reported quarterly revenue of $113.8 billion and outlined capital expenditures for 2026 of $175–185 billion (approximately KRW 230–240 trillion), signaling a major increase in AI data-center investment. To fund this, the company issued around $20 billion of corporate bonds in mid-February (about KRW 26 trillion), building an “AI war chest.” These massive investment plans, coupled with ongoing litigation related to its Gemini AI platform, have contributed to recent stock-price volatility.

As a leading U.S. big-tech company behind Search, YouTube, Android and Google Cloud, Alphabet is competing with Apple, Microsoft and others for global AI leadership, leveraging its generative-AI platform Gemini and robust cloud infrastructure. Long-term, stock-based awards tied to share price performance and total shareholder return form a significant portion of compensation for CEO Sundar Pichai and key executives like Ruth Porat and John Kent Walker, and the latest disclosures illustrate how this performance-linked structure translates into concrete equity changes.