alt Hacker NewsI mean, $11B in quarterly operating income ($33B in revenue) is clearly quite a lot. The only reasonable argument here is that this includes hardware sales (i.e. TPUs), but it is still a lot even if you subtract that. I think many folks internalized the narrative that GCP was an also-ran many years ago (when that was demonstrably true), but haven't updated their priors now that revenue is almost the same as (and may soon surpass) Azure's.
Google has spent $132 billion on capex this year. Most of that money is going to GCP. We have to think about the hundreds of billions being invested to contextualize the profit numbers. $40 bill a year is not enough to justify the capex they’re partaking in, GCP still needs to grow a lot to be successful.