Bluesky Thread

Semianalysis: TPU dominance

November 28, 2025 View original thread

Semianalysis: TPU dominance

Fascinating article. They argue that the reason for NVIDIA’s circular investment deals is to intertwine their own fate with that of the big labs, to keep themselves on top

OpenAI saved 30% on their NVIDIA GPUs merely by buying TPUs

open.substack.com/pub/semianal...

open.substack.com

Google TPUv7: The 900lb Gorilla In the Room

Anthropic’s 1GW+ TPUs, New customers Meta/SSI/xAI/OAI, Full Stack Review of v7 Ironwood, CUDA Moat at risk, Next Generation TPUv8AX and TPUv8X versus Vera Rubin

47 5

TPUs are going to be sold externally

I’ve heard this, apparently the rumor comes from Semianalysis

link 1: semianalysis.com/accelerator-...

link 3: www.anthropic.com/news/expandi...

chain for 2026. We also revealed that the reason for these order increases was the fact that Google would begin selling systems externally to multiple customers. In early September, we revealed that one of the big external customers will be Anthropic, with demand of at least 1 million TPUs. This was officially confirmed by Anthropic and Google in October. We also called out Meta as a big TPU customer on the 7th of November, weeks before others. In addition we have discussed other customers as well.

re Anthropic specifically

term 1: $10B in TPUs sold to Anthropic via Broadcom, and deployed directly in Anthropic’s datacenters

term 2: remaining $15B is rented via GCP

Beyond renting capacity in Google datacenters through GCP, Anthropic will deploy TPUs in its own facilities, positioning Google to compete directly with Nvidia as a true merchant hardware vendor.

oh wow. They explain how crypto miners have pivoted to supplying power for AI workloads

Google’s legal onboarding process (MSA, etc.) takes up to 3 years, while these crypto miners will do it in weeks

As a result, Google has shifted to working with crypto miners

While other hyperscalers have expanded their own sites and secured significant colocation capacity, Google has moved more slowly. We believe the core issue is contractual and administrative. Each new datacenter vendor requires a Master Services Agreement, and these are multibillion-dollar, multiyear commitments that naturally involve some bureaucracy. Yet Google's process is especially slow, often taking up to three years from initial discussions to a signed MSA.

subtext: power = electricity

yes, deploying a new datacenter these days requires acquiring power

so no, new datacenters aren’t leeching off the grid

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