The amount of money on the table isn't 2 billion dollars. The amount at stake is the difference between 2 billion dollars over 5 years, and the theoretical best case operating costs of your own infrastructure, which very well might be higher than Google's because Google's scale is bigger. Snap might say to themselves that they don't want to be paying Google's margins, so they invest a billion dollars in development for infrastructure with identical performance costing only 350 million a year instead of 400 million. Is that worth it?
