[andreyk]

"To think that any entrant no matter the size could come into the space and successfully develop a device in such short order is amazing."

Is this a fair statement? I mean , this is Google. Hardware development is not easy or cheap, and they've been at it for years. They ponied up lots of money for AI starting as early as 2012, and this company is all about running huge jobs on lots of compute on giant data - it is hard to think of a company more suited to developing this kind of hardware (same for Facebook, in that sense).

[jjm]

You are right. Traditionally it was/is considered a difficult road to come into any space different than your core. Seems like Google and Amazon are really good at executing almost anything.

[novaRom]

It is about money. Google and Amazon can offer significantly better compensation than many other companies. So, they can attract the most productive engineers.