Why Google thinks other clouds are ‘wrong’ on machine learning

Google CEO Sundar Pichai may acknowledge that the future is multi-cloud, but that doesn’t mean he thinks all clouds are equal. In a revealing comment during the company’s Q2 earnings call, Pichai dropped this bombshell: “[T]here is a tremendous cost to your business of being on the wrong [cloud] architecture.”

In other words, Pichai believes going with anything but Google is something of a dead end.

Now, if only he could convince the majority of enterprises that have elected to go with cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), or leading contender Microsoft Azure.

Which is of course what he spent the earnings call, as well as the company’s Google Next conference, trying to do. Much of the focus of the earnings call (and conference) was just how much the company is spending to improve and expose its machine learning smarts. Lest this get lost, Pichai called it out: “The common thread you’ll hear on today’s call is the benefit of machine learning and AI, and how it’s improving our products and generating great results for our users and partners.”

Though Google is, at heart, an advertising business, Pichai didn’t want to restrict machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to improving search ads. Instead, he talked about how the investments in machine learning extend to the cloud, touting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as: “a natural extension of our long-time strength in computing, data centers, and machine learning.”

Those improvements haven’t come cheap. Though not exclusively tied to GCP, Alphabet’s capital expenditures (CapEx) jumped 95% year-over-year to $5.5 billion in the quarter. At the same time, Alphabet’s biggest area for operating expenditure (OpEx) increases has been on its cloud business, with “the majority of our headcount growth…in technical roles and engineering and product management” within GCP, Google’s Ruth Porat noted on the call.

It’s clear Google/Alphabet is spending big to make a play for cloud workloads. It’s also clear that the differentiated value it’s peddling is “supercharged information,” as Google Cloud chief Diane Greene put it in a blog.

What’s also becoming clear is that Google doesn’t plan to simply pitch the virtues of its machine learning smarts, but also plans to swat down so-called cloud pretenders to the AI throne.