China will make sure they have a frontier lab, there's plenty of chance for Google to catch up once the compute crunch gets more serious.

Google needs to catch up on what? Devs mindshare? The latest Opus 4.8 carefully selected benchmarks made sure to pick Gemini 3.1 Pro and not Gemini 3.5 Flash: 3.5 Flash is beating Opus 4.8 on several of the benchmarks Anthropic posted but simply was ignored.

I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.