[phillypham]

Depending how you count, parent comment is accurate. Hardware doesn't just appear. 4 years of planning and R&D for the first generation chip is probably right.

[dgacmu]

The first TPU (Seastar) was designed, tested, and deployed in 15 months: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04760

They started becoming available internally in mid 2015.

[mike_hearn]

I was wrong, ironically because Google's AI overview says it's 15 years if you search. The article it's quoting from appears to be counting the creation of TensorFlow as an "origin".

[dgacmu]

That's awesome. :) and even that article is off. They probably were thinking of DistBelief, the predecessor to TF.