Google is in a different position to others in that they're the only frontier lab with a cloud infra business. It obviously makes sense to sell GPUs on cloud infra as people want to rent them. In that respect Google buys a ton of GPUs to rent out.
What's unclear to me is how much Google uses GPUs for their own stuff. Yes Gemini runs on GPUs now, so that Google can sell Gemini on-prem boxes (recent release announced last week), but is any training or inference for Gemini really happening on GPUs? This is unclear to me. I'd have guessed not given that I thought TPUs were much cheaper to operate, but maybe I'm wrong.
Caveat, I work at Google, but not on anything to do with this. I'm only going on what's in the press for this stuff.
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Google is in a different position to others in that they're the only frontier lab with a cloud infra business. It obviously makes sense to sell GPUs on cloud infra as people want to rent them. In that respect Google buys a ton of GPUs to rent out.
What's unclear to me is how much Google uses GPUs for their own stuff. Yes Gemini runs on GPUs now, so that Google can sell Gemini on-prem boxes (recent release announced last week), but is any training or inference for Gemini really happening on GPUs? This is unclear to me. I'd have guessed not given that I thought TPUs were much cheaper to operate, but maybe I'm wrong.
Caveat, I work at Google, but not on anything to do with this. I'm only going on what's in the press for this stuff.