How much does hiring a deepmind-like team cost though? (massively more than the TPU resources?)
Still within reach of pharmaceutical industry I guess, but maybe not so easy for academia.
And they had income around 100 million in 2019 but it's all against Google, so looks like a 2 billion +/- 0.5 operation so far, and who knows if they pay for compute.
Other articles place the runrate at 500 million per year in 2019.
Which means 500 million * 6 years = 3 bn + 0.5 purchase price. = 3.5 bn. So somewhere in the 2.5 - 3.5 billion range its seems likely as total cost so far.
Nevertheless doesn't seem out of reach for a multinational.
Remember, we are looking in hindsight that it seemingly paid off. A few years ago, this was just an educated bet; only the richest companies with money to burn (from selling ads) would be willing to take on that kind of a risk.
There is barely any multinational that has the freedom Google had of planning to spend 3.5B with no ROI. Their shareholders would sue and vote the managers out.