I think that's just shifting the question; how much return is there on being a "leader in AI"?

I'm very skeptical of the data center cooling thing. That's been trotted out for years as basically the only example of something they did that generated money. It's not really in the wheelhouse of modern ML for starters (it's an optimization problem) so I highly doubt it used a meaningful part of the research or talent tied up in deepmind. Furthermore, I don't believe that google is not somehow running their cooling significantly better than industry standard.

I'm sure they found an efficiency but it's probably closer to what a HVAC consultant could have found that they just assign credit to deepmind for. It just feels like one of those examples.