IBM Begins Power9 Rollout with Backing from DOE, Google https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/12/06/ibm-begins-power9-rollout...
Google's Data Centers Now Have IBM Inside https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-cente...
Introducing Zaius, Google and Rackspace’s open server running IBM POWER9 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...
They're also a platinum-level member of the OpenPOWER consortium (i.e. they have a position on the board of directors).
What is crazy is that we sent people to Google about moving stuff to their cloud offering, and when I asked about the Power9 thing nobody knew anything!
Meanwhile, ARMv8 is already available to the public!
packet.net offers access to a full dedicated dual ThunderX box for $0.5/hr (or 0.1 with spot instances).
Scaleway offers KVM virtual machines (also on ThunderX) for as little as €2.99/month (€0.006/hr).
First gen ThunderX kinda sucks at single-thread performance, but you get many cores and… well, you get to start using non-x86 machines, on public cloud, right now.
If developers start actually using ARM boxes for their projects, the providers will be more likely to expand in this direction, and maybe in a year (or less?) we'll see the much more powerful ThunderX2 boxes available, and hopefully more providers will get into this…
Maybe other cloud providers, and/or private clouds, would consider that.