Now, I'm not saying this is likely, but I am not familiar enough with this area to say definitively why it is not possible. See tweets:
Tweet references:
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-FPGA-s-less-efficient-than-ASICs
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Programmable_Photonic_Chips_Adapt_PICs_to/a68811
The inability to do useful work while simultaneously mining has been described as critical to mining game theory, but has anyone considered ultra-efficient MEMS reconfigurability that allows switching between AI matrix multiplication and bitcoin SHA-256 on demand? Can any chip person say why it is certainly going to be X amount more expensive on either capex or opex?
If AI services and mining chips were the same chip, it seems like it might pose a massive centralization risk that could disrupt the efficient processing of transactions while the market cap of bitcoin remains small enough that other compute services are a much larger market.
Of course, this is not really a threat to bitcoin since even if AWS had chips that could flip to mining mode, if the US compelled them to 51% attack, it would only slow down transaction finality while causing unsustainable and highly costly damage to the economy. Of course, something being extremely foolish and costly is not a guarantee it will not work when dealing with emergent "actors" that are highly irrational.
If such chips were to come about, it then might be in the interest of all nations to use them and provide compute services. Moreover, it might mean that there would be a lot of value in being able to decouple the service layer from the hardware itself to ensure there is a global, liquid market for compute, if such a thing is possible (I know there have been various shitcoins over the years talking about such things).
Again, this is just a thought experiment.