Good point. Though, my impression of Andrew Ng's tenure at Google was that he was running a high visibility deep learning project[1] that was attracting some big names, and one would think he'd have had some authority to get hardware provisioned sooner rather than later. Certainly his level of authority is much greater within Baidu now than it was at Google.
Google has a LOT of highly famous AI/ML/DL researchers like Hinton, Kurzweil and Norvig to name some off the top of my head. Ng is certainly very highly regarded but he was one of many there. It seems like at Baidu he's top dog.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2013/05/neuro-artificial-intelligence/a...