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But when you think about it it's actually a bit more complex. Right now (eg) OpenAI buys GPUs from (eg) NVidia, who buys HBM from Samsung and fabs the card on TSMC.
Google instead designs the chip, with I assume a significant amount of assistance of Broadcom - at least in terms of manufacturing, who then buys the HBM from the same supplier(s) and fabs the card with TSMC.
So I'm not entirely sure if the margin savings are that huge. I assume Broadcom charges a fair bit to manage the manufacturing process on behalf of Google. Almost certainly a lot less than NVidia would charge in terms of gross profit margins, but Google also has to pay for a lot of engineers to do the work that would be done in NVidia.
No doubt it is a saving overall - otherwise they wouldn't do it. But I wonder how dramatic it is.
Obviously Google has significant upside in the ability to customise their chips exactly how they want them, but NVidia (and to a lesser extent) AMD probably can source more customer workflows/issues from their broader set of clients.
I think "Google makes its own TPUs" makes a lot of people think that the entire operation in house, but in reality they're just doing more design work than the other players. There's still a lot of margin "leaking" through Broadcom, memory suppliers and TSMC so I wonder how dramatic it is really is
They've obviously adapted the design but it's a risk optimising in hardware like that - if there is another model architecture jump the risk of having a narrow specialised set of hardware means you can't generalise enough.
It'll be true, everyone does see it coming (just like with rare earth minerals). But the market-infected Western society doesn't have the maturity to do anything about it. Businesses won't because they're expected to optimize for short-term financial returns, government won't because it's hobbled because biases against it (e.g. any failure becomes a political embarrassment, and there's a lot of pressure to stay out of areas where businesses operate and not interfere with businesses).
America needs a lot more strategic government control of the economy, to kick businesses out of their short-term shareholder-focused thinking. If it can't manage that, it will decline into irrelevance.
>America needs a lot more strategic government control of the economy, to kick businesses out of their short-term shareholder-focused thinking. If it can't manage that, it will decline into irrelevance.
If it is meant to be then its meant to be. If the US decides to cling to its old system and it fails well then we would know that it wasn't the best system after all. Humankind will keep moving forward even if it means that another continent controls the show.