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> Which means barrier to entry is very very high.

+1 on this. The tooling to use TPUs still needs more work. But we are betting on building this tooling and unlocking these ASIC chips (https://github.com/felafax/felafax).

Nah, just take a look at their own comparison page:

https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/v6e

The A100 (from 2020) had 300 TFLOPs (1.5x) and 80GB HBM. It's only now with Trillium that they are starting to actually beat Nvidia in a chip vs chip battle, but being faster per chip was never the point. TPUs were supposed to be mass produced and connected into pods so that they become cheaper and they indeed are.

Exactly. Kind of like the old days when they put together a massive amount of commodity CPUs to build search.

They are cheaper, yes. But GPUs are faster and easier to program.