[dekhn]

TPUs were originally intended to just be for internal use (to keep google from being dependent on Intel and nvidia). Making them an external product through cloud was a mistake (in my opinion). It was a huge drain on internal resources in many ways and few customers were truly using them in the optimal way. They also competed with google's own nvidia GPU offering in cloud.

The TPU hardware is great in a lot of ways and it allowed google to move quickly in ML research and product deployments, but I don't think it was ever a money-maker for cloud.