This isn't anything anyone can purchase, is it? Who's the audience for this announcement?
Google says Ironwood will be available in the Google Cloud late this year, so it's relevant to just about anyone that rents AI compute, which is just about everyone in tech. Even if you have zero interest in this product, it will likely lead to downward pressure on pricing, mostly courtesy of the large memory allocations.
It just seems like if you build on Tensor then sure, you can go home, but Google will keep your ball.
Most places using AI hardware don't actually want to expend massive amounts of capital to procure it and then shove it into racks somewhere and then manage it over its total lifetime. Hyperscalers like Google are also far, far ahead in things like DC energy efficiency, and at really large scale those energy costs are huge and have to be factored into the TCO. The long dominant cost of this stuff is all operational expenditures. Anyone running a physical AI cluster is going to have to consider this.
The walled garden stuff doesn't matter, because places demanding large-scale AI deployments (and actually willing to spend money on it) do not really have the same priorities as HN homelabbers who want to install inefficient 5090s so they can run Ollama.
Probably whales who can afford to rent one from Google Cloud.
The challenge is getting them to run efficiently, which typically involves learning JAX.
The programmer who writes code to run on these likely costs at least 15x this amount an hour.