Setting up a hardware platform of this kind that is useable in production costs significantly more than a couple of million

Still a blip for a company that was toying with $1B in Bitcoin.

this is more like couple hundred million TBH

Hundred million for the chip alone, a few hundred million for software (compiler, assembler, router, protocols, communications, load balancing, server, supercomputer utilization, power management).

The $100-million chip might very well be the easy part of this project...

As a software person it baffles me how we tend to overestimate our value compared to hardware. The chip design field is really demanding, especially with deep submicron processes and with rigorous testing & verification culture that blows out of the water almost everything software organizations do.

I doubt developing a compiler for this chip will be as costly as your estimate, especially given mature opensource compiler frameworks like LLVM (already adapted to similar TPU-like architectures) and upcoming pytorch glow, apache TVM ML-specific compiler frameworks. And especially given in our industry there are people with advanced degrees who are willing to jump through additional hoops and even accept pay cuts, just to work on a cool compiler.

I respect the hardware for what it is and what it could enable.