It's not like they're making their money from this though. All AI work is heavily subsidised, for Alphabet it just happens that the funding comes from within the megacorp. If MS had fully absorbed OpenAI back when their board nearly sunk the boat, they'd be in the exact same situation today.
They're not making money, but they're in a much better situation than Microsoft/OpenAI because of TPUs. TPUs are much cheaper than Nvidia cards both to purchase and to operate, so Google's AI efforts aren't running at as much of a loss as everyone else. That's why they can do things like offer Gemini 3 Pro for free.
It's not like they're making their money from this though. All AI work is heavily subsidised, for Alphabet it just happens that the funding comes from within the megacorp. If MS had fully absorbed OpenAI back when their board nearly sunk the boat, they'd be in the exact same situation today.
They're not making money, but they're in a much better situation than Microsoft/OpenAI because of TPUs. TPUs are much cheaper than Nvidia cards both to purchase and to operate, so Google's AI efforts aren't running at as much of a loss as everyone else. That's why they can do things like offer Gemini 3 Pro for free.