Google's stated goals seem to be very altruistic and to their credit, they do genuinely contribute heavily to good causes and open science and research. I kind of find it hard to believe a for-profit corporation is purely altruistic, but their play here seems to be to basically encourage research and make it more accessible to more people so that more human minds come up with novel ideas that Google itself might some day use in the future. e.g. I can see how investing millions of $'s in funding PhD students can pay off if even a single one of them discovers an obscure algorithm that increases efficiency of some process by just 0.1%, but at Google's scale that might still save millions of $'s more.