OpenAI Reportedly Plans to Buy Google AI Chips to Diversify Away From Nvidia, According to The Information
OPENAI REPORTEDLY PLANS TO BUY GOOGLE AI CHIPS OpenAI plans to purchase AI chips from Google ($GOOGL), according to The Information, citing a person familiar with the matter. Financial terms and the size of the potential deal were not disclosed. Reuters has not independently verified the report.
Context
If confirmed, OpenAI buying chips from Google, one of its main model rivals, would mark a major shift in AI compute supply and add Google's TPUs to a chip lineup long dominated by Nvidia hardware.
This is a secondhand report: Walter Bloomberg relayed a Reuters item citing The Information and a single person familiar with the matter, and Reuters said it had not independently verified it. Financial terms and the size of any deal were not disclosed. Neither OpenAI nor Google had confirmed the report in the posts collected here.
Deep dive
Late on October 27 Eastern time, Walter Bloomberg posted that OpenAI plans to purchase AI chips from Google, citing The Information and a person familiar with the matter. The post says financial terms and the size of the potential deal were not disclosed and that Reuters had not independently verified the report. Jukan posted the same report minutes earlier, describing the plan as OpenAI using Google's TPUs, and the prediction market Kalshi framed it as a move to diversify away from Nvidia.
Google designs its own AI accelerators, called Tensor Processing Units, which run its Gemini models and are rented to outside customers through Google Cloud. A purchase by OpenAI would put the ChatGPT maker among the companies relying on hardware from a direct competitor in frontier models. The reports do not say whether OpenAI would buy the chips outright for its own data centers or obtain them through cloud capacity, and they give no timeline or volume.
The report lands one day after the Oct 26 deck covered banks and Blackstone lining up 63 billion dollars to buy Broadcom built AI chips for Anthropic, a sign that the largest labs are spreading their compute bets across several suppliers rather than relying on one vendor.
Because this rests on a single anonymous source relayed through two intermediaries, readers should treat it as unconfirmed until OpenAI or Google comment or The Information's full reporting is available.
What to expect next
Watch for statements from OpenAI or Google, and for any follow up from The Information with deal size, chip generation and delivery timing. A confirmed agreement would make Google a supplier to its biggest consumer AI rival and would likely move Nvidia and Alphabet shares. It could also influence how other labs weigh custom accelerators against Nvidia systems in their next buildouts.