re: The answer isn't really obvious. Staying with your analogy, if somebody pulled up with a truck full of intelligent strong men that were already trained on the work (full validation) and guaranteed to have workman's compensation insurance (backed by a large, respected manufacturing company) versus your need to go out and recruit some skinny guys with ladders and buckets you may find it cheaper and faster to just use the guys in the truck.
But they don't have a ladder and bucket. They need to stand on each others shoulders and lick the windows. To use a ladder and bucket they need to employ somebody else with a ladder and bucket. So you've got your dream team all telling the weedy bloke how to wash the window and their main job is to ask you for money.
Google will probably evaluate whether to spin their own, or use Intel's facilities based on some rational basis.
But in the case of facebook, maybe there is more emotion in the decision.
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At the time Facebook was asked if it was planning a broad shift to non-x86 chips for production workloads. "It's not a question of if; it's a question of when," said Facebook system engineer Amir Michael.
... Facebook technology strategist and former AMD chap Vijay Rao said at the Linaro Connect Conference at the end of October
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