Wow! Thanks for taking the time on the long reply.

"You are defining 'cost' far too narrowly "

Agree but this is opposite here as Google has the advantageous compared to Nvidia. So something does not add up? I mean what you pointed out is a disadvantage for Nvidia? I mean heck the canonical AI framework Google controls. 100k stars on Github is just incredible and can only think of K8s doing anything similar?

A big difference I think you are missing is Google did NOT run their operation on Google Fiber. But they do on the TPUs. Google has over 4k production NN and the amount of money they save running them at less than 1/2 the cost for their own stuff versus using Nvivida is a huge amount of money.

But also keeps growing. Google has a fundemental advantage over their competitors having the TPUs. A perfect example is their new text to speech.

Speech using a NN at 16k samples a second at a reasonable price would be impossible without the TPUs.

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Clo...

Does NOT appear Volta is in striking distance. But more importantly Google will do a gen 3 and 4, etc. They have the data to iterate and Nvidia just does not.

But more importantly Google does the entire stack and Nvidia does NOT. AI it is so important to do the entire stack for efficiency reasons. Plus Google controls the canonical AI framework with TF.

"Google's business strategy only allows it to spread development costs over its own deployment "

Well that clearly is untrue. Just take their text to speech sold as a service and the cost of doing on Nvidia would have been prohibitive. They could not even offer the service without the TPUs.

"Do you work on the TPU team or something? "

No. But I have been running into all this hate for Google with the alt right all around firing Damore that logic is lost.

I was talking to a Russian this morning on Reddit and he was delusional because of his hate for Google based on him thinking they are left wing extremest.

"they have the resources to beat Google it its own game "

This is the exact problem for Nvidia. They do not have the resources to compete. That is the exact problem.

Chips will come from the big players and NOT third parties in the future.

The entire dynamics of the industry have changed and actually a lot more like the past ironically.

Google, Amazon, FB and other big players will do their own silicon. Even Tesla is suppose to do the same.

The reason is because the people that buy the chips now run the chips which was NOT true in the past. Use to be a Dell purchased from Intel and sold the machine to someone.

The big difference today is the users of the systems are centralized with the big cloud providers. So they now get the data to improve the chips which just was not true in the past.

Plus it is looked at as being a competitive advantage.

So Apple does their own. Google does their own including the PVC on the device. Amazon and FB will also do their own.

Google did the same thing years ago with networking. They quietly hired the Lanai team to build all their own network silicon which significantly lower their cost.

Heck Google then created their own network stack to make it determinate. It is how it was possible to create Spanner.

Tech companies are so much bigger today they have the resources to do all their own stuff and own every layer of the stack instead of using third parties.

Google could never be what they are today if they had not built their own stuff. Could you imagine the cost of using SAN instead of them creating GFS?