Not surprising at all. As a former Google employee, I'm regularly in contact with friends still at Google and the number of hardware engineers OpenAI has hired out of Google have drastically increased in the last few months. You can readily see for yourself just by browsing LinkedIn and looking at profiles of hardware engineers currently at OpenAI and noticing how many of them are former Google employees. Google's own TPU team is now a shell of its former self. I wouldn't be surprised if future Google TPUs are inferior to the new OpenAI chips.

Also, did you know that Google's TPU efforts previously also relied on help from Broadcom? https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/09/22/google_broadcom_t... It's absolutely unsurprising that former Google employees would bring this vendor relationship into their new company, given Broadcom did a good job helping Google with TPUs.