Posted by armcat 9 hours ago
Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner.OpenAI sells and reaches enterprise customers via GCP.
Enterprises want zero data retention guarantees and they're already on AWS or GCP, so this is how OpenAI reaches those customers and makes more money.
> Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.
This is a fairly big move by Google... It means revenue they have already booked and reported to shareholders they now might have to give away - potentially all of it. Bean counters hate that!
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.
Between selling TPUs to external companies and now hosting competitor models, Gemini just doesnt have the full faith of the Alphabet capital allocators, and I can't really blame them. A mature company like google would rather just expand their extremely profitable cloud business rather than dump billions into a black hole on the off chance they achieve RSI or superintelligence or whatever.
Sundar Pichai just this week.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/google-ceo-...
Signing partnerships and hosting third party models costs Google nothing, and in fact brings in a ton of revenue that will eventually go back into Gemini.
these are all zdr engagements and thus "enterprise" contracts.
basically it boils down to - anthropic already provides inference direct through GCP, Azure, and AWS - so to compete openai is doing the same.
The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.
These companies have a ton of cultural capital, sure, but in American capitalism that means nothing.
I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.
If I were google there's no way I'd leave their AI overviews in place as-is.