Aravind has a really interesting take on why the hyperscalers are moving into the weather model space.

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I think the real story here is not about weather accuracy, and it is definitely not about replacing ECMWF or NOAA in the future.

This is really about weather becoming part of the cloud infrastructure, about turning forecasting into a cloud-native service that’s deeply embedded within their compute ecosystems.

For sectors such as energy, insurance, agriculture, logistics and finance, weather is not just data, it is a key decision driver. If you can offer native, on-demand, customisable forecasts, users will start building their products and workflows around you: models, simulations, dashboards, alerts and triggers, aka a sticky service layer.

TL;DR: I think Google and Microsoft are trying to make weather foundational by turning it into a programmable infrastructure layer, that powers the horizontal layer of weather intelligence and climate services.