alt Hacker News> Of all the paths they could have taken
They can't innovate themselves, and rather than try to fix the reasons why (change in leadership, corporate structure, etc), they just buy a competitor, which they will most likely run into the ground. Perfectly reasonable!
Their area of expertise is in running large scale infra, which they have innovated a lot to get. They’re acquiring a company that has expertise in an area they're not familiar with, which needs large scale compute infra. It seems like their needs are aligned in this case.