Google only won the deal because they have great cards in their hand. Apple's homemade PCC nodes were never going to scale, but the TPUs would. Investors expected market displacement in all the wrong places.

The tea leaves were pretty easy to read, too; LLMs will eventually be commoditized. Once that happens, the only road to profitable AI will be paved with 1) branding and 2) cheap compute. Apple does not possess cheap inference hardware whatsoever. Their GPUs are raster-focused, inefficient and expensive for their dedicated compute role. Unless Apple crawls back to Nvidia with their tail between their legs, TPU inference was their only real option. The deal was even more obvious when you used Apple's local foundation models; they're downright eclipsed by the quality of Gemma. Once Apple Intelligence was announced, it became clear that Apple was the branding component in search of a strange bedfellow to thumb their nose at Nvidia.