Tech giants Google and Nvidia are considering Intel as their back up chip maker, reported Inforamtion on Monday. This move reveals growing concerns over supply chain concentration. In addition, it indicates that diversification is becoming a priority even for the biggest AI players.
Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has reportedly placed an order with Intel to manufacture more than three million Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) in 2028, according to a report by The Information citing sources familiar with the matter.
The report added that Nvidia has not yet committed to an order with Intel. However, the AI chipmaker is said to be assessing whether Intel's manufacturing technology can be used to develop a processor that integrates four graphics processing units (GPUs) into a single package.
Intel and Google in April had entered into a multi-year partnership aimed at advancing next-generation AI and cloud infrastructure, underscoring the growing importance of CPUs and custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs) in supporting increasingly complex AI workloads.
As part of the collaboration, Google Cloud will continue to utilise Intel's Xeon processors across its workload-optimised cloud instances. The latest Intel Xeon 6 processors currently power Google Cloud's C4 and N4 instances, supporting a wide range of applications including large-scale AI training, low-latency inference and general-purpose computing.
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The two companies are also expanding their joint development of custom ASIC-based IPUs. These programmable accelerators are designed to handle networking, storage and security tasks that would otherwise be processed by host CPUs. By offloading these functions, the IPUs help improve system utilisation, enhance efficiency and deliver more consistent performance across large-scale AI and cloud environments.
Similarly, Nvidia had announced plans in 2025 to invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a broader strategic partnership aimed at accelerating semiconductor innovation. Under the arrangement, the companies are expected to collaborate on data-centre and PC chips, while Nvidia would become one of Intel's largest shareholders with an approximately 4% stake. According to the announcement, Nvidia's investment was priced at $23.28 per share.
"This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel's CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms," Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang had said at the time.
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