In early 2018, top executives at Alphabet debated whether the company should leave the public cloud business, but eventually set a goal of becoming a top-two player by 2023, according to a report from The Information on Tuesday.

If the company fails to achieve this goal, some staffers reportedly believe that Alphabet could withdraw from the market completely.

After the report was published, a Google spokesperson told CNBC the article was "not accurate," and disputed that the company debated leaving the cloud market in 2018.

While Alphabet subsidiary Google is dominant in web search and advertising, the company is still a small player in cloud computing, which involves renting out computing and storage resources to other companies, schools and governments. In 2018 the company lagged Amazon, Microsoft and Alibaba in that market, according to industry research firm Gartner.