I have no doubts we'll see something interesting come out of this on a tech level, but nothing we'll actually be able to put to use ourselves. Big Iron companies are very platform agnostic - they couldn't care less if it's Intel, ARM or PPC as long as it provides massive amounts of resources within a minimal energy envelope. Using chips that use 50% less power would save them tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year in operations costs.
"Google said that 100 searches are equal to a 60-watt light bulb burning for 28 minutes. " (Source: PC Mag)
All the big companies want more power with lower energy consumption. x86 provides lots of grunt, but even the most modern x86 chips consume massive amounts of power compared to ARM and such. ARM so far doesn't have adequate grunt for datacenters, but the chips are insanely efficient. There's a reason we aren't seeing ARM chips in real computers - thus far, anyways. There's also a reason why AMD and Intel are scrambling to make their offerings more power efficient.
Companies like Google wouldn't back a losing horse. It it costs them 400 million to develop a custom bred PPC chip that offers the power they need but is insanely efficient, you can bet your butt they will do it.
http://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/#/Interesting read if anyone is interested.
