[alienthrowaway]

> Developing them is expensive

So are the electric and cooling costs at Google's scale. Improving perf-per-watt efficiency can pay for itself. The fact that they keep iterating on it suggests it's not a negative-return exercise.

[mike_hearn]

TPUs probably can pay for themselves, especially given NVIDIA's huge margins. But it's not a given that it's so just because they fund it. When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not. There was just a really strong philosophical commitment to doing everything in house no matter what.

[marsten]

> When I worked there Google routinely funded all kinds of things without even the foggiest idea of whether it was profitable or not.

You're talking about small-money bets. The technical infrastructure group at Google makes a lot of them, to explore options or hedge risks, but they only scale the things that make financial sense. They aren't dumb people after all.

The TPU was a small-money bet for quite a few years until this latest AI boom.