or to boost cloud revenues. one can argue the half the value prop from Google's perspective of AI in the search bar is to pump of cloud revs. After all, an AI search result probably costs 100x to deliver than the standard one.
At least as of 2017, 15% of Google searches were novel (had never been seen before) [0]. Assuming that still holds, and generously assuming that it's free to process the other 85%, 100x of 15% is still a big cost increase.
(And for all we know, Google is willing to offer similar deals to other accelerators in return for some compensation.)