Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1]
Why isn't reasonable to ask "where and when is the profit coming?"
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-reco...
Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today?
Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
This sounds suspiciously like a line from the WeWork documentary on Hulu.
Given that I expect to never see waymo brand cars shuttling people around, most likely they will license out the tech to companies who deal with customers or to the car companies themselves.
I'm a big supporter of what Waymo is doing, but I've always thought this is real end game for them precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Google is incredibly shy of anything that involves physical support and running a robotaxi service requires a lot of it along with operations/logistics. They are no Amazon.
Not only did GCP (and Azure, etc.) have to catch up with where AWS was 8 years ago, they've got to invest even more to catch up with where AWS is now.
It's obvious that GCP is a very long-term investment, but also one that it not just purely profit-driven for GCP in isolation, but also hugely strategic for Google as a whole.