It's not anything specific to Google. Tech is awash in cash and breakthroughs have been lacking. This seems like an obvious opportunity yet no one seems to be going for it.
Google supposedly is doing exactly this in some fields, e.g. Quantum computing. But I don't know enough about Quantum computers to tell if that effort is producing anything of value, I'm leaning towards no at this point. Maybe just throwing cash at a problem isn't as easy as it seems.
