Reminds me how Alibaba innovated in database space with a cluster of FPGAs doing LSM compaction with custom MySQL storage engine - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3299869.3314041

Basically they achieved massive improvements in throughput and latencies vs RocksDB, for some operations even an order of magnitude.

They even offered this as a service, but eventually pulled out. Not sure if they are still using it, but I was surprised that pretty much nobody else, as far as I am aware, is using any hardware acceleration for repetitive database workloads.