The DeepMind blog announcement highlights a critical, and often overlooked, second-order effect of such corporate-government partnerships: vendor lock-in at the frontier of science. While the provision of tools and credits is framed as empowerment, it also funnels publicly funded research toward proprietary AI stacks, potentially narrowing the technological diversity of the scientific toolkit. The real test will be whether this investment leads to genuinely open scientific advances or simply entrenches Google's models as the necessary, and later costly, gatekeepers for cutting-edge discovery. The commitment, while substantial, may also serve to preempt similar moves from cloud rivals in a key government sector.