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I'd like to notice that Google recently invested significant effort in using power8, including building their own servers based on it.

I hope these guys have enough motivation and resources to keep the platform alive. They use a huge lot of open-source software so I suppose the support will not be locked out in-house.

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I think it is merely an effort to not give Intel the monopoly over Google's datacenters. Because otherwise, Google will not have any negotiating power regarding prices of the chips.

This. I think a side-benefit is that it lets them evaluate alternatives to x86 on a larger scale, and that if anything, the effort will lead to more portable code.

Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy some AMD chips ? Are they that behind ?

I think power density and performance per watt are more important for Google than chip price. Power8 has greater density than Xeons with comparable Mips/W or Mflops/W.

I'm not talking about chip price but the cost of migrating and maintaining systems for separate architectures.

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