[joe_the_user]

I'd be interested if anyone has details.

It may be that the other cloud providers would then sell them to those individuals. Indeed, the job of entities called "distributors" to buy big lots from manufacturers and break them up.

And of course, I don't know what the point of (apparently) keeping them out of the average person's hand would be.

[newbuser]

For starters, Google especially for enterprise level hardware is known to limit their need to provide customer support; imagine supporting the chip would fall on Google, not any 3rd parties.