Does this mean google doesn't have enough external customer demand to fill the needs of it's GPU and TPU resources?
This is a classic cloud vendor move to get someone, anyone, using the fixed asset.
They're being paid, so of course they would do it. It's not much different than the reservations that GCP allows you to purchase today.
Alternatively, from the article: > For early-stage AI startups, Hu says one of the most common issues she hears is that startups are compute-restrained. Large enterprises are able to strike multi-year, massive deals with cloud providers for GPU access, but small startups are often left out to dry.
the clouds are unable to sell gpus/tpus for premium rates, and now are forced to give them as incentives and credits to customers