Ruth Porat

Ruth Porat (born 1957 in England, raised in Palo Alto) was one of Wall Street’s most powerful executives — Morgan Stanley’s CFO through the financial crisis — before joining Google as CFO in 2015, where her spending discipline earned her the nickname “Ruth the ruthless.” Since 2023 she has served as Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer, directing the capital behind one of the largest AI buildouts in corporate history.

Writing the checks for the AI era

Porat oversees Alphabet’s record AI capital expenditures — the data centers, chips, and infrastructure behind Gemini and Google Cloud, spending that climbed toward $100 billion a year by 2026 — and its investments in AI-driven science under Sundar Pichai. She has become Alphabet’s chief ambassador for AI’s upside: at the Fortune Global Forum in October 2025 she declared “we should be able to cure cancer in our lifetime,” calling AI “so much more than a chatbot” and a privilege of “this time in history.”

Her advocacy is personal. A two-time breast cancer survivor, Porat has repeatedly cited her own diagnoses to explain her conviction about AI in medicine, pointing to Demis Hassabis’s AlphaFold — which mapped over 200 million protein structures — and Google’s AI mammography work that matches expert radiologists in detecting early breast cancer. Speaking to oncologists at ASCO in June 2025 and to policymakers at Davos, she has framed AI as a general-purpose technology worth trillions in global GDP — while arguing every process, in business and government, must be rethought to unlock it.