What is the hardest thing to accomplish with something like a TPU? Is it the IP or the fabrication?
How does the TPU design offer improved performance? By leveraging IP or fabrication improvements?
How does the TPU design offer improved performance? By leveraging IP or fabrication improvements?
Becomes a chicken-and-egg problem.
Google was able to solve it by designing TPUs for internal usage first, therefore reaching minimum scale, and then making changes and offering it publicly.
So you'd need to be:
1) Chip designer
2) Massive internal user
3) Cloud service provider
I don't see any other company that has all 3. Amazon has (3), and maybe (1) if they hired the right people. Microsoft could have enough (2) to justify it, but they're going the way of FPGAs.
There are host of Chinese companies developing similar processors.