| I always thought Google was actually pretty good at taking over established, or rising markets, depending on the opportunity or threat they see from a competitor. Either by timely acquisition and/or ability to scale faster due to their own infrastructure capabilities. - Google search (vs previous entrenched search engines in the early '00s) - Adsense/doubleclick (vs early ad networks at the time) - Gmail (vs aol, hotmail, etc) - Android (vs iOS, palm, etc) - Chrome (vs all other browsers) Sure, i'm picking the obvious winners, but these are all market leaders now (Android by global share) where earlier incumbents were big, but not Google-big. Even if Google's use of TPUs are purely self-serving, it will have a noticeable effect on their ability to scale their consumer AI usage at diminishing costs. Their ability to scale AI inference to meet "Google scale" demand, and do it cheaply (at least by industry standards), will make them formidable in the "ai race". This is why altman/microsoft and others are investing heavily in AI chips. But I don't think their TPU will be only self-serving, rather, they'll scale it's use through GCP for enterprise customers to run AI. Microsoft is already tapping their enterprise customers for this new "product". But those kinds of customers will care more about cost than anything else. The long-term game here is a cost game, and Google is very, very good at that and has a headstart on the chip side. |