I m growing a small SaaS. And cloud costs are starting to hurt. I keep hearing about founders stacking $100-300k in Google Cloud credits, but all the advice feels vague or locked behind big-name accelerators.
Where did you actually get credits?
Any creative hacks or things to avoid?
If you ve cracked this, I d love to hear what worked.
And if you re still figuring it out too, just drop a comment. If I ve gathered some useful stuff, I'll be happy to share.
Google just made TPUs a first-class target for PyTorch, and you barely need to change your code.
The problem: TPUs power Gemini, Veo, and the largest AI clusters on earth, but using them from PyTorch required workarounds, framework rewrites, and deep hardware expertise most teams don't have.
The solution: TorchTPU is a PyTorch-native backend that lets you change one line of initialization and run your existing training loop on TPU, no core logic changes required.
What stands out:
⚡ Fused Eager mode: Auto-fuses ops on the fly for 50-100%+ speed gains, zero setup required by user
🐛 Debug Eager: Catches shape mismatches, NaNs, and OOM errors one op at a time so you fix bugs faster
🔁 Strict Eager: Async single-op dispatch mirrors the default PyTorch experience for a flat learning curve
🔧 torch.compile via XLA: Peak performance with full-graph compilation, battle-tested for TPU topologies
📦 Custom kernels via Pallas & JAX: Write low-level hardware instructions without breaking performance
🌐 DDP, FSDPv2, & DTensor supported: Scale distributed training without rewrites
🔀 MPMD support: Divergent code across ranks works without breaking your stack
💾 Shared Compilation Cache: Reduces recompilation overhead across single & multi-host deployments
On the roadmap for 2026:
- Public GitHub repo with docs and reproducible tutorials
- Dynamic shapes support via torch.compile
- vLLM and TorchTitan integrations
- Linear scaling validated up to full Pod-size TPU infrastructure
- Native multi-queue support for async codebases
Different because this isn't a wrapper or a fork; TorchTPU integrates at the PyTorch PrivateUse1 level so you get ordinary PyTorch Tensors on TPU hardware, no subclasses, no rewrites, no friction.
Perfect for ML engineers and research teams running PyTorch workloads who want to leverage Google TPU infrastructure without abandoning their existing codebase.
P.S. I hunt the latest and greatest launches in tech, SaaS and AI, follow to be notified → @rohanrecommends
@rohanrecommends For a mid-sized research setup, what's the biggest gotcha you've hit when scaling from single-host to multi-pod, and how does the shared cache help there?
Running existing PyTorch workloads on TPUs with minimal code changes is compelling — what's the experience like for jobs that depend on custom CUDA kernels? That's typically where XLA/TPU migration breaks down for large training pipelines.
The Skill Map output is what I want to understand better. Is it a snapshot — like a score you get once after a session — or does it update over time as you do more scenarios? Because a one-time assessment is pretty different from something that tracks how you're actually improving.