TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term

Summary

Hey everyone,As I find the topic of Google TPUs extremely important, I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.Topics covered:The history of the TPU and why it all even started?The difference between a TPU and a GPU?Performance numbers TPU vs GPU?Where are the problems for the wider adoption of TPUsGoogle’s TPU is the biggest competitive advantage of its cloud business for the next 10 yearsHow many TPUs does Google produce today, and how big can that get?Gemini 3 and the aftermath of Gemini 3 on the whole chip industryLet’s dive into it.The history of the TPU and why it all even started?The story of the Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) begins not with a breakthrough in chip manufacturing, but with a realization about math and logistics. Around 2013, Google’s leadership—specifically Jeff Dean, Jonathan Ross (the CEO of Groq), and the Google Brain team—ran a projection that alarmed them. They calculated that if every Android user utilized Google’s new voice search feature for just three minutes a day, the company would need to double its global data center capacity just to handle the compute load.At the time, Google was relying on standard CPUs and GPUs for these tasks. While powerful, these general-purpose chips were inefficient for the specific heavy lifting required by Deep Learning: massive matrix multiplications. Scaling up with existing hardware would have been a financial and logistical nightmare.This sparked a new project. Google decided to do something rare for a software company: build its own custom silicon. The goal was to create an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) designed for one job only: running TensorFlow neural networks.Key Historical Milestones:2013-2014: The project moved really fast as Google both hired a very capable team and, to be honest, had some luck in their first steps. The team went from design concept to deploying silicon in data c...