Sundar Pichai received over £180m compensation in 2022 as Alphabet CEO

Alphabet's Indian-American CEO Sundar Pichai received total compensation of about $226 million (£181m) in 2022, more than 800 times the median employee's pay, the company said in a securities filing.

Pichai's compensation included stock awards of about $218 million (£175m), the filing showed.

The pay disparity comes at a time when Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has been cutting jobs globally. The California-based company announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs around the world in January, equivalent to 6 per cent of its global workforce.

Early this month, hundreds of Google employees staged a walkout at the company's London offices following a dispute over layoffs.

In March, Google employees staged a walkout at the company's Zurich offices after more than 200 workers were laid off.

Meanwhile, Alphabet said that it would buy back $70 billion (£56bn) in stock and posted first-quarter profit and revenue above estimates as demand rose for cloud services and ad sales held up better than expected.

Google has been scrambling to keep pace with rivals, notably Microsoft Corp, in rolling out new artificial-intelligence software that can generate long-form responses to queries and other prompts.

Microsoft committed $10bn (£8bn) to OpenAI whose ChatGPT software has been the talk of Silicon Valley since a free version was introduced in November.

(Reuters)