Honestly I’m not sure if 1 billion of investment is that much for what Google is promising with Stadia.
The custom gaming hardware they’re deploying to their datacenters cannot come cheap. Each server instance will be running on hardware which could easily cost Google over $1,000 with scale discounts even with a sweet deal with AMD. Server-class CPUs and high-end GPUs robust enough to run in a datacenter, and server class memory + SSDs which need to live far longer than ordinary consumer parts don’t come cheap.
At $1000/blade, if they deployed 250,000 across all of their datacenters put together, they’ve already spent a quarter billion dollars purely on parts.
Then there are the people costs (both engineers building the product + people working in the datacenters supporting the hardware), the costs to run the hardware (cooling/power) and deliver the content, the costs for the 3rd-party content and licensing, and then add in the new studio they’re building.
It would be very easy for Google to have already spent well over $1 billion on Stadia