GCP is profitable and growing 27% YoY. It made more money than YouTube ads did in Q2 2023. In what world would it make sense to shut down GCP at this point?

I think the "google shuts things down" trope is justified and something that I wince at every time I see something like this, but GCP isn't a random pet project that loses money and has no users. It's a very successful enterprise business.

(disclaimer: I work at google in cloud, so obviously I have personal bias, but this is just my opinion based on the pure numbers.)

I really doubt that. They’re starting to finally turn a profit ($200 million) and it’s a 8 billion in revenue a quarter line of business. Google shuts down businesses that aren’t as revenue generating but 8 billion a quarter (32B annually) is a massive business and the “losses” are likely mostly from R&D reinvestments to keep growing that line of business.

Is there a reason to believe this will happen?

Lol. The people you find on Hacker News sometimes...