The classic answer to any question like this at Google was "but does it have the same level of profitability as ads?" This was commonly cited as a reason Googl

The classic answer to any question like this at Google was "but does it have the same level of profitability as ads?" This was commonly cited as a reason Google shouldn't get into several different areas (cloud being one). I kid you not, one of the most common arguments I had when I joined google was that google was late to the cloud, the response was always "we have a cloud, it's called borg" and "we have a cloud, it's called appengine" while I'd have to explain to people that there was an entire market of people who wanted to "import numpy" on 128-core machines. Another answer is that Google has quietly dominated industrial AI for some time; few people talk about SmartASS, or Rephil or SETI , and most modern ML folks would barely recognize Sibyl, yet those products help Google grow Ads into a monster business. YouTube (Watch Next) and Android (Play Store) both have Sibyl to thank for rapid growth at a critical time. Google played a big role in bringing around modern deep learning (voice recognition, language modelling) and is one of the largest, if the not the largest, industrial deep learning research publishers. Another answer is that while google vends access to TPU thru cloud, it's a tricky product to maintain and sell for external users, and to keep the product affordable, they are making some very serious decisions about how much gets used internally vs. deployed (an Ads job running on a TPU is likely more valuable than a customer job running on a TPU) with massive capital expenditures on hardware and facilities that affect their earnings and profits. Yet another answer is, Google is one of the largest resellers of access to nvidia GPUs but they don't dominate because they entered this business a bit late and their competitors (amazon and microsoft) are excellent at selling products to enterprise and at buying large piles of GPUs and running facilities. I just don't think it's in Google's DNA to be highly profitable outside of a few businesses- a search page for ads, ads in videos, ads in applications, ads around the internet, etc, and it's unlikely to change any time soon, because their top leadership doesn't know how to cultivate new products (stadia and google+ being two particularly egregious examples).