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Comment by hacym | Hacker News Reader

Does GCP not make Google money?

No. GCP consistently loses money.

One of many sources: https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/27/alphabet_q2_2022/

> Google Cloud brought in $6.3 billion of revenue, a 35 percent year on year increase compared to Q2 2021’s $4.6 billion revenue. But the $858 million loss was 45 percent higher than the $591 million deficit recorded last year.

You might ask: "how is that possible, with those same margin-intensive prices that AWS and Azure use?" I have no clue. It makes no sense, given the prices they charge.

What is or isn't cloud is different at every company on top line but especially bottom line. For example how far down the stack are engineers still considered cloud when they are supporting both cloud and internal products? Investors are fine losing money on growing cloud and also love to see ad margins up? Then everyone is cloud.

I don't think salaries are the driving factor behind GCP's balance sheet, but that's just my opinion. I obviously can't wave a magic wand and find out for sure either, but my own back of the napkin math can't see that reasonably working out. They brought in billions of additional revenue, but their losses also increased.

Similar reasons to a company with 30 tps 8am - 6pm has a 3 h/a Kafka running on a k8s cluster, multi master MySQL cluster, all the trimmings

Built to scale that isn’t here today ? Resume Padding ? Data centers are expensive and slow unto build

Labor costs to keep all of these features/servers/infra running is expensive. Google is probably charging less due to competition from AWS/Azure/Oracle.

Similar to how Amazon.com is subsidized by AWS. GCP is subsidized by the ad biz

You wouldn’t think so based on the quality of their support team

GCP revenue losses from being down are approximately lower bounded by (downtime in seconds * revenue per second). Their costs don't decrease from being down.

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