Comment by macNchz
Pure speculation, but I’d guess that an arrangement with Google comes with all sorts of ancillary support that will help things go smoothly: managed fine tuning/post-training, access to updated models as they become available, safety/content-related guarantees, reliability/availability terms so the whole thing doesn’t fall flat on launch day etc.
Probably repeatability and privacy guarantees around infrastructure and training too. Google already have very defined splits for their Gemma and in house models with engineers and researchers rarely communicating directly.