Comment by bruckie

Google uses a lot of weather data in their products (search, Android, maps, assistant, probably others). If they license it (they previously used AccuWeather and Weather.com, IIRC), it presumably costs money. Now that they generate it in house, maybe it costs less money?

(Former Google employee, but I have no inside knowledge; this is just my speculation from public data.)

Owning your own data and serving systems can also make previously impossible features possible. When I was a Google intern in 2007 I attended a presentation by someone who had worked on Google's then-new in-house routing system for Google Maps (the system that generates directions between two locations). Before, they licensed a routing system from a third party, and it was expensive ($) and slow.

The in-house system was cheap enough to be almost free in comparison, and it produced results in tens of milliseconds instead of many hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. That allowed Google to build the amazing-at-the-time "drag to change the route" feature that would live-update the route to pass through the point under your cursor. It ran a new routing query many times per second.