[choppaface]

Besides the many CAPEX-vs-OPEX tradeoffs that are completely unavailable due to not being able to buy physical TPU pods, there are inherent Google-y risks e.g. risk of the TPU product and/or support getting killed or fragmented / deprecated (very very common with Google), your data & traffic must also be locked in to Google’s pricing, and you must indefinitely put up with / negotiate with Google Cloud people (in my experience at multiple companies: worst customer support ever).

Google does indeed lock in their own ROI with deciding to not compete with AMD / Graphcore etc, but that also rooflines their total market. If they were to come up with a compelling Android-based Jetson-like edge product, and if demand for said product eclipses total GPU demand (robotics explosion?) then they might have a ramp to compete with NVidia. But the USB TPUs and phone accelerators today are just toys. And toys go to the Google graveyard, because Googlers don’t build gardens they treat everything like toys and throw them away when they get bored.