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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn’t Google sell these?

They are now https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/google-to-sell-tpu-chips-t...

The quote is: “As TPU demand grows from AI labs, capital markets firms, and high-performance computing applications, we'll begin to deliver TPUs to a select group of customers in their own data centers in a hardware configuration to expand our addressable market opportunity.”

They could still be renting them out.

They are finally starting to. Oracle just announced a week or so ago that they're going to be introducing TPUs to their cloud next year for customers to use.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/oracle-e...

Interesting times ahead with a number of chip makers now vying for this market. TPUs are a mature chip now which gives some strong advantage. At the same time as the TPU announcement, they also mentioned they'll be deploying Cerebras systems as well.

It’s a competitive advantage which allows them to deliver lower cost per inference. If quality continues to asymptote, best value becomes most interesting to consumers.

Then again, if they can provide competition to Nvidia, it may force Nvidia to lower prices across the board.

The huge capex of designing and taping out a chip generally means that you wanna make and sell as many of said chip as possible.

Google wants to rent as many TPUs as possible.

Only if you think the external market is relevant in comparison to Google itself.

Every TPU they keep for Google Cloud reduces the need to buy GPUs from Nvidia. Or really, in this market, means they have additional ability to support AI compute beyond what they can buy from Nvidia.

Because it has been historically strongly coupled to the Google infra, both hardware and software. Now the situation has improved and now they are selling this to external clients, though it is still in a limited fashion.

They do. In particular they sold to Anthropic.

But they don't sell to you or I, which is what matters. Why would people care about Anthropic or Oracle?

And even if Google sold them, they probably won't sell any affordable ones. Nvidia sells DGX Spark, but who can afford to buy them?

They don't care about you. Anthropic/Oracle pays a sh*t ton of $$$ for it. How much can you pay? lol

Enterprise support is far easier than random customer support.

Nvidia also doesn't sell you a vera rubin rack.

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