Do you mean, sell TPU hardware to other companies that would run it in their data centers? I can't imagine that would ever really work. The only reason TPUs work at Google is because they have huge teams across many different areas to keep them running (SRE, hardware repair, SWE, hardware infra) and it's coupled to the design of the data centers. To vend and externalize the software would require google to setup similar teams for external customers (well beyond what Google Cloud provides for TPUs today) just to eke out some margin of profit. Plus, there is a whole proprietary stack running under the hood that google wouldn't want to share with potential competitors.
Google used to sell a search appliance-in-a-box and eventually lost interest because hardware is so high-touch.
> Google used to sell a search appliance-in-a-box and eventually lost interest because hardware is so high-touch.
We had a GSA for intranet search and other than the paint this was a standard Dell server. I remember not being impressed by what the GSA could do.
We also had Google Urchin for web analytics, it wasn't a hardware appliance but the product wasn't very impressive either. They then killed that and tried to get you onto Google Analytics.
They just didn't commit to these on premise enterprise products.
Google used to sell a search appliance-in-a-box and eventually lost interest because hardware is so high-touch.