Google says all TPU inventory is tied to signed customer contracts

The signal here is structural rather than numerical: capacity is being pre-committed through contracts, which shifts the competitive question from who can pay to who can secure allocation ahead of time. That favors large, established buyers with the leverage to sign forward commitments, while smaller or later-arriving customers face a tighter path to compute. With volumes and contract values undisclosed, the scale of the squeeze remains unclear. Worth watching is whether this contracted-allocation model becomes the norm across AI accelerator supply, and whether any transparency on volumes follows.