It's a win for Google that LLMs are getting cheaper to run. OpenAI's service is too expensive to be ad-funded. Google needs a technology that's cheaper to provide to maintain their ad-supported business model.
At the time, operating YouTube was eye wateringly expensive and lost billions. But google could see where things were going: a triple trend of falling storage costs, falling bandwidth and transmission costs (I’m trying to dig up a link I read years ago about this but google search has gotten so shit that I can’t find it).
It was similar for Asic miners for Bitcoin. Given enough demand, specialised, lower cost hardware specially for LLMs will emerge.
[0] https://cppcast.com/ai_infrastructure/ [1] https://github.com/orgs/unum-cloud/repositories?type=all