This makes perfect sense. It's all about economics both w respect to intel and nvidia. You can't be paying 8-10k per gpu, and you are not going to pay that when

This makes perfect sense. It's all about economics both w respect to intel and nvidia. You can't be paying 8-10k per gpu, and you are not going to pay that when you can make something far cheaper and faster. Google got this done in what two years?? All the debates around the tech comparisons miss the economic picture. Who cares if 4tpu's being compared to one volta. Point is those 4 chips together cheaper than buying one v100. Bitcoin mining no different. Do you care how many chips (196) are in an antminer s9? No! What matters is that it mines 13000x faster than a gpu for roughly double the price. Facebook, Amazon and the likes have every incentive to go down this custom ASIC path. Google is now hiring sales folks for their tpu cloud. There is a reason they are not selling the hardware. It's more valuable to them to get tenants the other hyperscale competition can't match. So think all the hyperscale guys now looking for ways to keep up which obviously is horrible for nvidia. A lot of people have missed how much of nvidia's story been about essentially killing it on one very narrow use case, ml training, in a very short time. This is basically 50%+ of all profit growth they have achieved last two years. Nvidia has got some serious challenges ahead.