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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Do you have numbers on that? Google was one of the largest manufacturers in the world for a couple years there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still up there.

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Are you serious?? I don’t think that has happened.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google's TPU's pushed them far over the edge on this. I'd bet TPUs running inference for Ads models can basically print money for the company.

They've also already been building their own network chips for some time. So, given the scale of their datacenters, I think it's entirely reasonable that they'd outpace nvidia.

I think you may have too high expectations of how much TPUs Google really needs, and how much of those Google is using for training Adsense models.

There are such an insane number of processors being made, we have Apple, Amazon, AMD, Nvidia, Google all buying their stuff from TSMC. I would be very surprised if Google was the biggest of them all.

Absolutely. They were reportedly the largest player in the server space around 2012 [1] (and consumed the entirety of their own production). Since then they've had multiple high-sellers across multiple product categories. The Google home devices ship tens of millions of devices a year on their own. Google may be better known for software and it's not all on the leading edge nodes, but they produce a lot of HW.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-server-manufacturing/

What years were those? Why did they stop?

Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.

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