This is the bigger headline than their Gemini release. AI is all about how much compute dollars it can generate for the cloud providers. Google is trying to make sure Microsoft doesn't monopolize AI compute.
Kelsey Hightower told me at a GopherCon (many years ago) that Google doesn't run any internal workloads on third-party GPUs mainly because it costs significantly more (b/c cooling iirc), though they are happy to help you run your workloads on such GPUs.
> AI is all about how much compute dollars it can generate for the cloud providers.
If the providers wanted to extract more money they would not create custom hardware which reduces overall costs and prices to users.
I would argue that this is actually more about ensuring NVidia doesn't have a monopoly on hardware and alleviates us from having to pay for Nvidia profits through our cloud providers.
Azure is going down the same path here: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/15/23960345/microsoft-cpu-g...
Extracting money is about margins, not revenues. If they reduce your costs (and their revenue) by 20% with a TPU, but they can produce TPUs for 50% less than buying gear from Nvidia, it's still a profitable move.
The "extracting" word typically comes with abusive connotations when used in the context of money, which doesn't feel like the right word for the win-win outcomes imho
He also shares what he has learned for free, rather than putting paywalls in front of his content, which is quite rare these days.
Higher efficiency results in greater utilization.