Universities and Tech Giants Back National Cloud Computing Project - The New York Times

So there has been a brain drain of computer scientists from universities to the big tech companies, lured by access to their cloud data centers as well as lucrative pay packages. The worry is that academic research — the seed corn of future breakthroughs — is being shortchanged. Academic work can be crucial particularly in areas where profits are not on the immediate horizon. That was the story with deep learning, which dates to the 1980s. A small band of academics nurtured the field for years. Only since 2012, with enough computing power and data, did deep learning really take off. There have been smaller efforts for university research to tap into the big tech clouds. But the current concept of an ambitious public-private partnership for a National Research Cloud came in March from John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li, co-directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.