--- title: "Google's TPU Dilemma: Opening the Market Door, Yet New Cloud Providers Like Nebius and CoreWeave Choose to Wait" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/285182027.md" description: "In the same week that Google announced plans to sell TPUs directly to customers, three major U.S. cloud service providers—Nebius, Lambda, and CoreWeave—publicly stated they would not follow suit for now. Lambda’s CFO bluntly remarked that the company has “green blood” (implying NVIDIA), with 99% of its demand indeed coming from NVIDIA GPUs, while CoreWeave cited risk-return considerations as the reason for sticking with the GPU track" datetime: "2026-05-05T09:56:15.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/285182027.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/285182027.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/285182027.md) --- # Google's TPU Dilemma: Opening the Market Door, Yet New Cloud Providers Like Nebius and CoreWeave Choose to Wait Google is pushing hard to bring TPUs to market but has hit a wall at the most critical distribution stage. According to a recent report by The Information, in the same week that Google announced its plan to sell TPU chips directly to customers, executives from **Nebius, Lambda, and CoreWeave**, three mainstream U.S.-based cloud service providers, stated at a public event that they do not intend to adopt TPUs in the near term. Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated during an earnings call that the company plans to sell TPUs to a “specific customer base,” focusing on financial services and frontier AI sectors. This statement itself reveals a strategic shift by Google—no longer pursuing widespread adoption akin to GPUs, but instead focusing on a select few customers willing to engage in deep collaboration. However, the collective refusal by these three cloud service providers highlights the realistic challenges facing the construction of Google’s TPU ecosystem. ## “We Have Green Blood” When asked about TPUs, Lambda CFO Chuck Fisher gave a one-sentence answer: “We have green blood.” Green is NVIDIA’s brand color. Nebius Chief Revenue Officer Marc Boroditsky provided even more direct data: **99% of his company’s customer demand comes from NVIDIA GPUs.** Occasional inquiries about TPUs usually come from former Google employees—because they had used this chip previously. “Unfortunately, the circle of former Google employees cannot sustain a market,” Boroditsky said. Nick Robbins, Vice President of Corporate Development at CoreWeave, offered an explanation from the perspective of return on investment. He pointed out that the primary users of TPUs—Google itself, Anthropic, and Meta—are also major buyers of GPUs. This means that even if the TPU market share grows, demand for GPUs will not disappear. “For every dollar we invest and every megawatt we allocate, we are making risk-adjusted bets on what will deliver the highest long-term returns,” Robbins said. “When 99% of the market wants the same thing, even if that proportion drops to 90%, it is hard not to focus on that 90%.” The stance of these three companies is not surprising. Nebius, Lambda, and CoreWeave are all deeply tied to NVIDIA—NVIDIA is their largest supplier, a key investor, and in some cases, an important GPU customer. ## Google’s Response: Bypassing the Mainstream, Finding Alternative Paths Google has not failed to attempt cooperation with mainstream cloud service providers. According to reports, last year Google explored closer collaborations with cloud providers such as CoreWeave and Crusoe, hoping to deploy TPUs alongside GPUs in their data centers. However, these negotiations largely came to nothing. Ultimately, Google turned to a less well-known partner—the software and data center startup Fluidstack—and provided billions of dollars in lease and debt guarantees for its deployment of TPUs delivered to Anthropic. This shift, from attempting to enter multiple mainstream cloud providers to signing contracts with emerging players like Fluidstack, indicates that the TPU market outside of Google Cloud remains quite concentrated. In terms of financing, Google is also actively laying the groundwork. According to a February report by The Information, Google has signed an agreement with an undisclosed large investment institution to jointly fund a joint venture that leases TPUs to other customers. Google is also in discussions with potential financing partners, planning to borrow funds through special purpose vehicles to purchase TPUs and lease them to customers. Unlike NVIDIA’s approach of supporting early cloud service providers, Google needs to intervene more proactively in the financing stage—because there is no ready-made market for TPUs. ## Long-Term Variables: Can a Multi-Chip Ecosystem Break the Status Quo? Despite their clear short-term stance, Nebius’s Boroditsky also acknowledged that TPUs could gain a larger market share in the future. He stated that several companies are currently developing cloud-based software which, if successfully implemented, would make it easier for developers to use different types of chips, thereby reducing dependence on a single hardware provider. “It is difficult for a single brand to form a monopoly—there will be more diversity in the future,” he said. “This happened in the CPU sector, and I expect the same scenario to play out again.” This judgment has reference significance for the entire AI chip market. Currently, NVIDIA dominates the AI training and inference chip market, but the maturation of multi-chip compatible software could be one of the key variables changing this landscape. ### Related Stocks - [GOOGL.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/GOOGL.US.md) - [CRWV.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/CRWV.US.md) - [GOOG.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/GOOG.US.md) - [NBIS.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/NBIS.US.md) - [META.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/META.US.md) - [NVDA.US](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/NVDA.US.md) - [NVD.DE](https://longbridge.com/en/quote/NVD.DE.md) ## Related News & Research - [Google’s Run Faces Tight Risk-Reward as Earnings Loom](https://longbridge.com/en/news/284535773.md) - [Google Cloud surpasses $20B but says growth was capacity-constrained](https://longbridge.com/en/news/284653827.md) - [Google to sell its TPUs to some customers, who also fancy big-G GPUs](https://longbridge.com/en/news/284688671.md) - [Meta and Alphabet will spend a combined $335 billion this year. 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