Ever since Google's inception there was always this intrinsic motivation to tackle real life hard problems and get the best and brightest people to solve them.

Ever since Google's inception there was always this intrinsic motivation to tackle real life hard problems and get the best and brightest people to solve them. Add to that their huge investment into machine learning and related fields and you can see why they bought DeepMind and other similar companies/projects. Protein folding, as far as I understand, is a very challenging problem. There's a huge profit potential for such endeavour, not to mention the scientific advancement of that field. Only a fool would let that chance pass by. Recall that Alphabet was created with the intention of forming a group of different, unrelated and independent companies (of which Google is part of and basically funds the entire operation). The goal here, IMO, is to diversify investment and therefore increase profit potential. To get a better picture of the whole thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc. Also, read the founders' letter: https://abc.xyz/ https://abc.xyz/