Midjourney Says TPU Migration Set Back Research by a Full Year, Regrets Leaving NVIDIA

r/singularity·medium signal

Midjourney publicly stated that migrating to Google TPUs set their research back by approximately one year, expressing regret about not sticking purely with NVIDIA GPUs. The post gained 532 upvotes on r/singularity. This is a significant counter-signal to the narrative that TPUs are universally cheaper — while Midjourney cut inference costs 65% on TPUs, the research velocity loss matters more for companies pushing model frontiers. For builders choosing infrastructure for training vs. inference, the lesson is clear: optimize each workload separately.