But there never really was a moat in LLM?.. I mean, I don't know where you stand, but my perception is that we all kinda knew that the whole time since 2017, and really knew that since DeepSeek. What they really care about is:

1. Customer acquisition.

2. Cheap(er) electricity/hardware.

So it's really surprising to me that them making their own chip surprises anyone at all. The electricity thing is already kinda being taken care of by earlier strategic alliances with some other evil people, the chip is a natural next step.

Definitely has that smell... At the same time though, they NEED inference cost to drop substantially, and even better for them if it only happens for their models on their hardware.

I assume they're doing everything they can to make that happen model-side, but coming at it from the other end makes sense too if they can swing it.

Maybe, but they’re also a massive company. At some point Google stopped being a startup and become a massive company with margins to look after

Nearly all those initiatives have failed though