The minute that search engine giant Google wanted to be a cloud, and the several years later that Google realized that companies were not ready to buy full-on platform services that masked the underlying hardware but wanted lower level infrastructure services that gave them more optionality as well as more responsibility, it was inevitable that Google Cloud would have to buy compute engines from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia for its server fleet.
And the profit margins that Intel used to command for CPUs and that AMD now does, and that Nvidia still commands for GPUs and will for the foreseeable future, also meant that it was inevitable that Google would create its own CPUs and AI accelerators to try to lower the TCO on its server fleet, particularly for inside work like search engine indexing, ad serving, video serving, and data analytics in its myriad forms and hyper scales.
And so, every time a Google Cloud event comes around, as one has this week, we get a little more information about the compute engines that Google is buying or building as it assembles its server fleets. Google doesn’t do product launches like normal chip vendors do, with lots of die and package shots and a slew of feeds and speeds and slots and watts. We have to piece it together over time, and wait for a retrospective paper to come out some years hence to find out what Google is actually doing now.