Comment by aseipp

That is correct, and I should have been more, clear: when I say "Buy them" I mean direct sales of the hardware from seller to buyer. I am not referring to cloud compute style sales. Yes, they have been offering TPUs through Google Cloud for a long while now, but this still falls under all the stuff I said earlier: they don't need to have sales pipelines or channels (outside GCloud's existing ones), they don't need to design the hardware/software for arbitrary environments, they have one set of staff and machines to train and support, etc. All of that stuff costs money and ultimately it results in an entirely different sales and financial model.

Google could spin the TPU division out of Google, but 99% of the time people refer to moves like that they omit the implied follow up sentence which is "I can then buy a TPU with my credit card off the shelf from a website that uses Stripe." It is just not that simple or easy.