My curiosity is not the free AI summaries (which they can opaquely tune as necessary), but instead the renting of TPUs to Anthropic and OpenAI. Many of these contracts were announced last minute and seemed to involve a very desperate Anthropic. Based on the Anthropic/xAI data center contract, they’re willing to pay crazy markup to get immediate access to compute.

I want to know how impacted Gemini has been by that, because that will reveal a lot about their margins and revenue generating first party demand. Each MSFT earnings report they discuss the balance they’re dealing with between supplying GPUs to Azure customers and first party demand.

My pet theory is that Gemini is “losing” the LLM race because they’re preferentially selling the TPUs to competitors, while keeping just enough for themselves to stay competitive and build their own products.