[spacebanana7]

Google is capable of burning truly huge amounts of money on projects that look exciting and have long term prospects (e.g Youtube). They could lose $10-20 billion a year on Waymo for a decade if needed.

You can't just cancel Sergey's favourite pet project, regardless of economics.

[dmix]

That's easier to stay that when it's an R&D project doing pilot runs in a small set of cities. When you need tell shareholders you want to run a fleet of 100k cars then those numbers start becoming very serious.

Waymo also took $11B from outside investors, so it's just not Alphabet taking the risk