While that is true. They state that they are specifically giving every YC company this deal. So you won’t have to hope that they accept you into their program, once you’re in yc you’re guaranteed it.

Why? Google doesn't have any monopoly on compute clusters, in fact they aren't even the market leader.

(And for all we know, Google is willing to offer similar deals to other accelerators in return for some compensation.)

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.

Only the first time, once the answer is optimized, they can keep it for the next one hundred people

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.

[0] https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

I see this as competitive rather than anti-competitive. Google does not have a monopoly position here and is competing to become the supplier to these startups.

That’s a well-functioning market, I think.

It’s specifically YC companies.

It’s likely so that GCP can get its hooks in these startups early.

Its not likely. It is why they are doing it.

I see it as advantage for their competitors, they'll waste so much money on hyped AI startups others can invest in other thing.

YC startups given startup status and preapproved for "Google for Startups Cloud Program" didn't sound as good.

> Google will provide a dedicated cluster with priority access

This is the key part. Even with the credits there is a GPU shortage.