Data centers are hardly new technology... For the longest time, people had no idea where the cloud was because the footprint was pretty small. It's another golden goose moment where everyone is going to build DCs and we might end up like in the dotcom bubble where way too much fiber was deployed for what was necessary at the time.
The number the developer gave in a press release was "20-30." I find that reasonable as a very large Facebook data center near me has a permanent staff of around 50. Keep in mind that these large DCs use contractors for the majority of the work, which unfortunately doesn't really help with employment because the contractors mostly come in from out of state (there is a HUGE temp labor market for traveling IT technicians and skilled crafts get hired mostly from big national outfits that just send whatever crew is available next). It is good for the hotel business though.
You have no idea how much maintenance is required. Just replacing hard drives, not even counting server repairs, new servers installation, network infrastructure installation and maintenance, power distribution, generator engineering, water treatment etc etc
You're confusing colos and first-party data centers. A colo mostly relies on its customers for installs and maintenance. Google, MS, FB, Apple etc own the entire building so all the functions are local: server install and maintenance, network install and maintenance, generator maintenance, electricians, water treatment in some cases... That's very easily in the hundreds if not thousands for big sites.
Count the cars here: 36.242186561973, -95.32619746715035
Yep, and anything outside of that is contracted groups that come in from outside. Maybe a hotel in the area would get a little more business, but it won't be much.
Thanks for that, now I have a rock-solid argument when people say "oh we're already Microsoft customers, we'll just use Azure, it's easier, and they have Active Directory!!"
Some airlines and/or local aviation authorities have additional restrictions. China wants CCC certified power banks, Thailand has a strict 160 Wh limit. Both are very strictly enforced.
Google basically invented modern AI (the 'T' in ChatGPT stands for Transformer), then took a very broad view of how to apply broadly neural AI - AlphaGo, AlphaGenome being the kind of non-LLM stuff they've done).
A better way to look at it is that the absolute number 1 priority for google since they first created a money spiggot throguh monetising high-intent search and got the monopoly on it (outside of Amazon) has been to hold on to that. Even YT (the second biggest search engine on the internet other than google itself) is high intent search leading to advertising sales conversion.
So yes, google has adopted and killed lots of products, but for its big bets (web 2.0 / android / chrome) it's basically done everything it can to ensure it keeps it's insanely high revenue and margin search business going.
What it has to show for it is basically being the only company to have transitioned as dominent across technological eras (desktop -> web2.0 -> mobile -> (maybe llm).
As good as OpenAI is as a standalone, and as good as Claude / Claude Code is for developers, google has over 70% mobile market share with android, nearly 70% browser market share with chrome - this is a huge moat when it comes to integration.
You can also be very bullish about other possible trends. For AI - they are the only big provider which has a persistent hold on user data for training. Yes, OpenAI and Grok have a lot of their own data, but google has ALL gmail, high intent search queries, youtube videos and captions, etc.
And for AR/VR, android is a massive sleeping giant - no one will want to move wholesale into a Meta OS experience, and Apple are increasingly looking like they'll need to rely on google for high performance AI stuff.
All of this protects google's search business a lot.
Don't get me wrong, on the small stuff google is happy to let their people use 10% time to come up with a cool app which they'll kill after a couple of years, but for their big bets, every single time they've gone after something they have a lot to show for it where it counts to them.
Yeah, and Google has cared deeply about AI as a long term play since before they were public. And have been continuously invested there over the long haul.
The small stuff that they kill is just that--small stuff that was never important to them strategically.
I mean, sure, don't heavily invest (your attention, time, business focus, whatever) in something that is likely to be small to Google, unless you want to learn from their prototypes, while they do.
But to pretend that Google isn't capable of sustained intense strategic focus is to ignore what's clearly visible.
I haven't followed that closely, but Gemini seems like a pivot based on ChatGPT's market success
Google is leading in terms of fundamental technology, but not in terms of products
They had the LLambda chatbot before that, but I guess it was being de-emphasized, until ChatGPT came along
Social was a big pivot, though that wasn't really due to Pichai. That was while Larry Page was CEO and he argued for it hard. I can't say anyone could have known beforehand, but in retrospect, Google+ was poorly conceived and executed
---
I also believe the Nth Google chat app was based on WhatsApp success, but I can't remember the name now
Google Compute Engine was also following AWS success, after initially developling Google App Engine
>I haven't followed that closely, but Gemini seems like a pivot based on ChatGPT's market success
"AI" in it's current form is already a massive threat to Google's main business (I personally use Google only a fraction of what I used to), so this pivot is justified.
If you are defining "pivot" as "abandon all other lines of business", then no, none of the BigTechs have ever pivoted.
By more reasonable standards of "pivot", the big investment into Google Plus/Wave in the social media era seems to qualify. As does the billions spent building out Stadia's cloud gaming. Not to mention the billions invested in their abandoned VR efforts, and the ongoing investment into XR...
I'd personally define that as Google hedging their bet's and being prepared in case they needed to truly pivot, and then giving up when it became clear that they wouldn't need to. Sort of like "Apple Intelligence" but committing to the bit, and actually building something that was novel, and useful to some people, who were disappointed when it went away.
Stadia was always clearly unimportant to Google, and I say that as a Stadia owner (who got to play some games, and then got refunds.) As was well reported at the time, closing it was immaterial to their financials. Just because spending hundreds of millions of dollars or even a few billion dollars is significant to you or I doesn't mean that this was ever part of their core business.
Regardless, the overall sentimentality on HN about Google Reader and endless other indisputably small projects says more about the lack of strategic focus from people here, than it says anything about Alphabet.
> Well, "pivot" implies the core business has failed and you're like "oh shit, let's do X instead".
I mean, Facebook's core business hasn't actually failed yet either, but their massive investments in short-form video, VR/XR/Metaverse, blockchain, and AI are all because they see their moat crumbling and are desperately casting around for a new field to dominate.
Google feels pretty similar. They made a very successful gambit into streaming video, another into mobile, and a moderately successful one into cloud compute. Now the last half a dozen gambits have failed, and the end of the road is in sight for search revenue... so one of the next few investments better pay off (or else)
The link you posted has a great many very insignificant investments included in it, and nothing I've seen Google doing has felt quite like the desperation of Facebook in recent years.
I didn't really see it at first, but I think you are correct to point out that they kind of rhyme. However to me, I think the clear desperation of Facebook makes it feel rather different from what I've seen Google doing over the years. I'm not sure I agree that Google's core business is in jeopardy in the way that Facebook's aging social media platform is.
reply