[jfim]

I'd argue that most of their capital comes from their employees, not their hardware. Any company can buy hardware that's functionally equivalent to Google's. Even with a massive pile of cash and being able to buy the same amount of hardware that Google has, it would be useless without the software that makes it run, and that software is made by their employees.

There are definitely sectors of the industry (such as manufacturing or insurance) where capital and automation drives value generation, but Google is in the business of writing software, which isn't really automatable.

[tanilama]

But software can be written anywhere.

I do think Google has good engineers, but they are really not that indispensable