[prasadjoglekar]

Any reason to believe Google's unit economics on AI are any different than the other players here?

And Google is an advertising company. Mostly in search, and increasingly dependent on YouTube. Everything else is a net money loser, including Waymo, Gemini etc.

[asa400]

Almost doesn’t matter what Google’s short term unit economics on AI are as long as their shareholders and board are OK with it. Google makes money hand over fist and can afford it. Microsoft is fine, Oracle is fine, TSMC is fine. These other shops are leveraged to the hilt, so they’ll be in a world of hurt if people stop buying, financing, or investing.

[scarface_74]

Oracle is not fine. They are borrowing money hoping to get paid back by money losing OpenAI propped up by VC funding.

No business is going to run workloads on OCI outside of ones running Oracle. They a They are a way distance fourth in cloud. I’ve been working in cloud consulting for five years including the first three directly at AWS (Professional Services). No one worried about having talking points about competing against Oracle.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon have both internal products that can benefit from inference and cloud hosting.

[wmf]

Oracle is going to get screwed if they build a bunch of data centers and the customers (mostly OpenAI) all declare bankruptcy.

[hsjsjdnbdbdb]

Oracle has started creating bonds with really long maturity 40years...?

[scarface_74]

You should listen to the latest episode of the Acquired podcast about Google.

Google also has GCP and unlike OpenAI who is dependent on VC funding and Oracle who is borrowing money. Google throws off cash like crazy and self funds its infrastructure which is already better than everyone else’s

[x-complexity]

> Any reason to believe Google's unit economics on AI are any different than the other players here?

Only when it comes to their TPUs, and sometimes that one thing may just be the difference to push them over the hump.

Per-token cost-wise, TPUs (& specialized processors in general) will beat GPUs every time. The efficiency difference between the 2 types is never to be ignored, & is likely why they can shotgun it everywhere.

> And Google is an advertising company. Mostly in search, and increasingly dependent on YouTube. Everything else is a net money loser, including Waymo, Gemini etc.

1) Each venture should be treated as a (relatively) isolated vertical slice

2) 9 out of 10 times, a venture just doesn't break even. That's just the nature of the business.

[sidibe]

Well there's no circular financing for one thing.