Hacker News Reader

Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.

View on HN

Even bigger advantage Google has, in addition to TPUs and other stuff, is bundling. Bundle paid AI tiers with other products and entice users with clever pricing tiers, and you're golden. In fact this is what Google already does. Cheapest paid AI tier - 4$ and you also get two hundred gigs of cloud storage and photo backup and office and stuff. You want more storage - sure we have that, plus some higher AI usage limits on top of that, or maybe you want average storage but much more AI tokens? We have that too. Family packs? Sure. And so on. OpenAI doesn't have a photo editor or a music streaming or or funny reels network to bundle their expensive AI with.

Googles bundling really is ingenious and possibly illegal.

I bet a significant chunk of folks reading this have a recurring charge from Google for extra storage, compute, hosting, YouTube, etc.

Google became really good at nickel/diming people

Amazon has its own hardware in the pipeline, Microsoft would be stupid to not work on one, so best to assume they are at the very least a buyer of such a thing from AMD/Intel.

Microsoft has https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/01/26/maia-200-the-ai-... already.

> i.e. in 6 months

Why are Amazon or Microsoft going to be forced to compete on cost in six months?

If the big cloud players slowly agree to compete on price then that means that OpenAI and Anthropic are suddenly in a much weaker negotiating position.

Google has never competed on having a price advantage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com