Exclusive: Behind Google’s TPU Ground War to Lure Nvidia’s Most Loyal Customers

Google is kicking off a ground war with Nvidia.

While Google is one of the biggest buyers of Nvidia AI server chips, it has also been developing its own competing AI chip business that represents a threat to Nvidia’s dominant market share. 

Before this year, Google’s tensor processing units were housed almost entirely in Google facilities and could only be rented from Google Cloud. Now Google is trying to sell those TPUs to young cloud providers, known as neoclouds, that have done only one thing so far: develop facilities to rent out Nvidia graphics processing units.

One such neocloud that Google recently tried to sell TPUs to is Nscale.