Google is selling TPUs so enterprises can run AI on premises
Ashkenazi did not name the customers or describe the commercial arrangements, leaving open questions about whether the systems are being deployed by large enterprises, governments, sovereign AI initiatives, or other cloud providers.
Until recently, Google’s TPU strategy centered on giving customers access to the chips through Google Cloud, while using the same silicon internally to power its own AI models and services. But during the company’s last earnings call in April, just days after it released two new TPU models, CEO Sundar Pichai said Google would consider selling TPUs to AI labs, capital markets firms, and high-performance computing applications.
On Wednesday’s call, Pichai said Google will scale up TPU sales “based on the opportunities we see and the demand we see, commensurate with the constraints that exist and the allocation needs we have for frontier model development.”
