A key thing to understand about Google is that under the hood is a collection of extremely powerful fiefdoms (many of which would stand as their own fortune 500, hell 100) that are all trying to act in their own interest. It's almost closer to a conglomerate than a company, where Google needs to bid internally against external players for resources.

If Gemma 4 is less lucrative than Claude to the Google Cloud kingdom, the Cloud kingdom will want you using Claude.

interesting. presumably this is why google is selling TPUs externally instead of hoarding them for deepmind.