From what I can gather, Google bought Deepmind for 500 million USD in 2014, they have outstanding debt to its parent company as of 2019 of 1.3 billion USD.

And they had income around 100 million in 2019 but it's all against Google, so looks like a 2 billion +/- 0.5 operation so far, and who knows if they pay for compute.

Other articles place the runrate at 500 million per year in 2019.

Which means 500 million * 6 years = 3 bn + 0.5 purchase price. = 3.5 bn. So somewhere in the 2.5 - 3.5 billion range its seems likely as total cost so far.

Nevertheless doesn't seem out of reach for a multinational.

It would still be a significant amount of money for a lot of companies.

Remember, we are looking in hindsight that it seemingly paid off. A few years ago, this was just an educated bet; only the richest companies with money to burn (from selling ads) would be willing to take on that kind of a risk.

Only the energy cost savings google got from Deepmind probably already makes it a very profitable acquisition https://deepmind.com/blog/article/deepmind-ai-reduces-google...

I appreciate this tremendous 3.5B subsidy that Google brought to basic ML research and R&D.

There is barely any multinational that has the freedom Google had of planning to spend 3.5B with no ROI. Their shareholders would sue and vote the managers out.

That's the cost of running DeepMind as a whole, right? Which includes all the other stuff they've worked on, like games.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, that's the whole lot of it.

Also, pharma does not really have a huge incentive to work on this problem. Solving the protein folding problem does not automatically translate to new drugs just in the same way CRISPR or DNA sequencing did not. It's another tool in the toolbox (which to be clear is a big deal).