It'd also be really interesting to a similar view on cost per square foot. The US is probably expensive from high labour + land costs, but it might more even expensive than those would suggest.
I wonder if there's a way to factor in planning time needed. My perception is that the US requires years of (e.g. environmental) reviews before construction can begin which countries like China do not have.
TSMC has a great business today, but world governments are dumping around a few hundred billion dollars in subsidies towards local TSMC competitors (e.g. ~$25B-$75B from the CHIPS act alone depending on how you count)
TSMC's moat isn't enough to withstand that much subsidized competition. All of those new competitors will chase market share and destroy the profitability of the market.
I would think of this like a normal customer development / lean startup problem.
Is there anyone other than your company using this API? If not, it might make sense to find a single "customer" and make sure the API solves tons of problems for them. If you cannot get first adopter, iterate on the product/API until you can create something that a customer loves.
It sounds like people don't see strong enough value in being the early adopters of these APIs. You might need to iterate on API/product until they do.
I wonder how they're thinking about this versus the steady march of solar + battery performance.
I would think that in the 5-10 years it'll take to get this safe enough for a commercial product, solar + battery would be scaling and they'd never be able to catch up on price due to the efficiency ceiling.
Maybe there's something possible in aviation for this. There might be electric drones/planes applications which would be way better if they didn't have to carry batteries.
The article does not point out how the system can go astray.
Design docs are great when they can in 1-2 pages describe a how an important/large/complex system will work and the tradeoffs made when designing it.
Some groups in Google confuse design docs conflated with the promotion process, and thus engineers start create long/time consuming docs for every little thing as part of building a case for promotion.
To justify spending that money, they'd have to think they'd get better returns on their R&D than shareholders could get elsewhere (e.g. by just buying the S&P 500).
It is quite difficult to beat the S&P 500, and they're saying they don't have any ideas which can.
For the most part, the standard strategy still works fine; spend less than you earn, keep an emergency fund, invest in low-fee stock/bond funds like the ones recommended here https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio.
As real interest rates go lower, the cost of capital goes down. That would make some capital intensive businesses possible/profitable that wouldn't be otherwise.
They have not deployed their tech at scale, when competitors (Tesla) has widely deployed worse technology.
Even if they deploy their tech widely, it isn't clear it will generate significant revenue/profit. It might not be that expensive (think less than 1B) to build a good enough self driving car in 10 years. That'd create competition and drive down prices.
Someone else might figure out how to capture the value of self driving cars too. Maybe the profitable parts of self driving cars are the "apps" you can build once self driving cars are cheap.
I wouldn't invest in Waymo at 100B until they have a real business with real revenue and a real moat to protect that business.
Google takes large long-term bets that are closely related to their core business / competency. Some of those seem to be clearly working (see Cloud, Deepmind). As a shareholder, I want to see more of those.
Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people.
As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.