These investments don't seem either dishonest or stupid. Only a fool would buy compute capacity from Google (at least without a special deal), and Google needs

These investments don't seem either dishonest or stupid. Only a fool would buy compute capacity from Google (at least without a special deal), and Google needs apparent wins to sell GCE. They're paying with compute capacity for advertising. They're paying a lot less than they would otherwise be, since costs don't equal sticker price. Right now, AWS has 1/3 market share and Microsoft 1/4. Google claims 1/10th, but that's only by gaming numbers e.g. by including Google Workspace into figures. Now, they've got a massive amount of $$$ to keep those figures pumped up to maintain that 10% number. Amazon wants a bigger moat, or at least doesn't want Azure eating its lunch in the near future due to a lack of a reasonable AI service (MS is leading here, due to the deal with OpenAI). It needs a reasonable AI service on AWS. It is nowhere close to being able to make one themselves. It's giving money so it can have one, and have one from a company it's part-owner of. Thing is, both of these investments make absolute sense even without financial games, antitrust, incompetence, or much of anything else. As a footnote, if I were Amazon, I'd be looking at player like Groq. That could leapfrog Azure + OpenAI for many uses.