Having been privy to some of the contractual details of deals that Google has made with other medical centers, I’m betting that they probably got it for ”free”, as in they didn’t directly pay a set fee to the universities. Google most likely provided funding in the form of donations (tax write off), free cloud compute resources and/or cloud storage (write off), and the opportunity for university researchers to co-author high impact publications (everybody wins).

Also, 200k patients is actually kind of small. Granted this dataset is far more granular/robust than what you’d typically find in commercially available healthcare datasets, but to give you some frame of reference, the healthcare datasets I work with contain > 20 million individuals (again, with orders of magnitude fewer features).

I imagine the cost of the data, in this case, is negligible when compared to the cost of salaries and benefits for employees working on it.

Considering they have the ability to pick from thousands of hospitals and universities (the latter being where they actually got the data) they probably have a fairly large amount of leverage to keep the costs low.