This isn't coming out of nowhere, they have been doing custom ASICs for a while ...

jsnell on Oct 2, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Google developing own CPUs for Chromebook laptops

This isn't coming out of nowhere, they have been doing custom ASICs for a while already. The article mentions TPUs as an example. A more recent example are YouTube's in-house transcoding chips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034627