Google just blew $100 million buying a company that makes digital avatars
Companies buy other companies from time to time. This is sometimes more efficient and maybe even more cost-effective than if a company were to develop the technology themselves, plus it can also potentially help them skirt around intellectual property rights claims and so on.
That being said, it seems that Google has acquired a new company called Alter, a company that specializes in AI-based avatars and apparently they spent a whopping $100 million to snap them up. The goal is to help Google improve on their content game and make them a better competitor to TikTok.
Google has since confirmed the acquisition but stopped short of sharing additional details. It is unclear as to what Google actually plans to do with the company, especially since even for Google, $100 million is a lot of money to spend on a company that creates digital avatars. We imagine that perhaps the use of AI could be what attracted Google to them in the first place.
It is also possible that seeing as the metaverse is still a very hot topic, maybe Google wants to use their latest acquisition to create something to rival Meta by allowing users to create more realistic/accurate avatars within their own metaverse. Either way, we’ll have to wait and see how Google plans to leverage their latest acquisition.
Source: TechCrunch