Nebius, Lambda and CoreWeave Say ‘No’ to TPUs Amid Google’s Push

<p>Good morning! Anissa here.&nbsp;</p><p>We’ve been tracking Google’s effort to expand the reach of its tensor processing units for quite a while, and two developments last week helped us understand where things are actually headed.</p><p>On one hand, Google said on its earnings call that it plans to sell its TPUs directly to customers for use in their own data centers—something <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-encroaches-nvidias-turf-new-ai-chip-push">we first reported last fall</a>. The move marks a significant shift: For years, TPUs were largely confined to Google Cloud.</p><p>On the other hand, though, three senior executives from leading neocloud providers— Nebius, Lambda and CoreWeave—told us they aren’t planning to adopt TPUs anytime soon.</p><p>Taken together, the signals point to a complicated reality for Google. Even as it opens up the market for its own chips, the very companies that could be best positioned to distribute that hardware aren’t convinced it’s worth their investment.&nbsp;</p><p>“We bleed green at Lambda,” said Lambda Chief Financial Officer Chuck Fisher after I asked him about TPUs onstage at The Information’s Financing the AI Revolution event last week.&nbsp;</p><p>Marc Boroditsky, chief revenue officer of Nebius, told me 99% of the demand his firm sees is for Nvidia graphics processing units. In the rare cases that a prospective customer inquires about TPUs at Nebius, he said, they are often Google alumni who’ve used the chips before.&nbsp;</p><p>“Unfortunately, the diaspora [of] folks from Google does not make a market,” Boroditsky said.&nbsp;</p><p>At CoreWeave, the calculus is similar. Vice President of Corporate Development Nick Robbins pointed out the top TPU users—Google itself, Anthropic and Meta Platforms—are also among the largest buyers of GPUs. That makes him quite confident that renting Nvidia GPUs will always be a good business.&nbsp;</p><p>“For any incremental dollar we invest or megawatt we allocate,