Google confirms its acquisition of data science community Kaggle

Google today said it is acquiring Kaggle, an online service that hosts data science and machine learning competitions, confirming what sources told us when we reported the acquisition yesterday. The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference this morning in San Francisco, while not disclosing the terms of the acquisition. But it's not all that surprising that Google would want to snap it up. With hundreds of thousands of data scientists on the platform, it would give Google the immediate ability to broaden its reach within the AI community. As it increasingly goes head-to-head with Amazon on the cloud computing front, it's going to need as much of an edge as it can get.