They have 500,000 developers, do the math at 30% commission for each assuming a $180k salary that's $50k even if they hire 0.1% of them that adds up to $50k * 500 = 25m they probably paid a few times more than that but not a few hundred times, which therefore makes this a pretty sweet deal for Google assuming the community keeps growing.

That 500,000 developers is a vanity metric. The real number is around 50,000 who have completed a challenge, and around 5,000 who are active on the site. Also of those 5,000 users the large majority are employed somewhere else.

do you have buy kaggle to hire kaggle members?

Well I'm not sure if they expose their members' contact info or if it'd be easy for Google to advertise on their site as effectively.

giving that acquihires in AI seem to go like $10M/head, Google access to that Rolodex would pay out pretty quickly

You don't think this would drive data scientists to use Google's cloud platform? I.e., if the most well-known data science competition uses the platform, then they will use it after the fact since it's what they know best. Right?