DeepMind's brain drain traced to TPU shortages, Google selling chips to rivals, and bureaucracy

Reporting on why Google's AI researchers keep leaving points to three causes: limited internal access to TPUs, resentment that Google Cloud sells those same chips to competitors like Anthropic, and slow-moving bureaucracy. Google allocates compute years ahead across research, product, and cloud customers, but priorities shift with little notice. Demis Hassabis reportedly stepped back from daily DeepMind operations about a year ago, finding management unfulfilling rather than being pushed out. A current Google employee called Jeff Dean's exit an example of "the vestiges of Google's idealism" dying out, adding "mediocrity is the likely result." The complaint about selling compute to rivals got a same-day demonstration when Google announced frontier lab Mirendil would buy over $100 million of TPUs and Nvidia GPUs through Google Cloud.

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