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Comment by jankeymeulen | Hacker News Reader

The TPUs are highly integrated with the rest of the internal Google ecosystem, both hardware and software. Untangling that would be ... interesting.

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We have a perfectly reasonable blueprint for an ML accelerator that isn't tied into the google ecosystem: nvidia's entire product line.

Between that and the fact Google already sells "Coral Edge TPUs" [1] I'd think they could manage to untangle things.

Whether the employees would want to be spun off or not is a different matter, of course...

[1] https://coral.ai/products/

Do you think that NVidia is happy to not have an online ecosystem to tie to its GPUs, for added (sales) value? They are more than happy to entangle the GPUs with their proprietary CUDA language.

For a large, established, quasi-monopoly company it's always more attractive to keep things inside their walled gardens. Suggesting that Google should start supporting TPUs outside Google Cloud is like suggesting that Apple should start supporting iOS on non-Apple hardware.

> Do you think that NVidia is happy to not have an online ecosystem to tie to its GPUs, for added (sales) value?

I think nvidia is ecstatic about having commoditised their complement, and having the only ML acceleration option that's available from every cloud provider and on-prem.

Why have Amazon, Google and Microsoft as competitors when you can have them as customers instead?

This is indeed so. But if NVidia could have some recurring revenue from the GPUs, maybe in the form of leasing GPU farms it runs in a proprietary way, it would also be nice. In that alternative universe, it would still have Google and MS as customers, the way AWS has many large-scale companies as customers.

Knowing what I know about big corporations, the biggest entanglement is going to be IP ownership, political constraints and promises to shareholders.

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