Google, on the other hand would need a reason to switch. Somewhere there's a spreadsheet with a number for energy cost savings that would make it worth it for Google to switch architectures. I've heard it's as low as 10%.
China has Zhaoxin, which develops domestic x86-compatible cores that have received massive state funding, despite little commercial success. They way it looks, I think that China has decided to stick with x86, with Zhaoxin as an "escape valve" for the case where chip supply from Intel and AMD gets threatened.
I thought they had a thing for MIPS64, at least in their supercomputers.
Google is already at least experimenting with POWER9, but it's not clear just how far that goes.
Here is the Google Blog post introducing Zaius: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...
of all places you think Google does this kind of cost-analysis in a spreadsheet?