Google rolls out new tech over a decade in the making to challenge Nvidia in the AI war

Google has spent over a decade quietly building the tech that’s now helping it punch way above its weight in the AI war.

While Nvidia sits at the top of the food chain, selling its GPUs to just about every major tech company on earth, Google has been busy designing its own weapons; chips it never intended to sell, but instead uses to power everything behind its AI stack.

And now, with demand for compute at an all-time high, that in-house silicon is finally showing its value.

On Thursday, Google confirmed that Ironwood, the latest generation of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), will be available in the coming weeks. It’s the company’s seventh-gen chip, built to handle everything from training huge models to running real-time AI agents and chatbots.

Ironwood, Google says, is over four times faster than the last TPU. One customer, Anthropic, is planning to deploy up to 1 million of them to power its Claude model.

Google builds, others catch up

Even though Google continues to stockpile Nvidia GPUs, it’s not just sitting around relying on other people’s chips. TPUs have been in development for over ten years and first became available to cloud customers back in 2018.

Originally used only for internal workloads, they’re now a central part of Google’s public Cloud AI infrastructure.

Analyst Stacy Rasgon from Bernstein said, “Of the ASIC players, Google’s the only one that’s really deployed this stuff in huge volumes.”

At the moment, Google doesn’t sell TPUs as physical hardware. Instead, customers rent access through Google Cloud, which has become one of the company’s biggest revenue engines.

Last quarter, Alphabet reported $15.15 billion in cloud revenue, up 34% from the previous year. Sundar Pichai, the company’s CEO, told investors: “We are seeing substantial demand for our AI infrastructure products, including TPU-based and GPU-based solutions.”

Deals, satellites, and space-bound chips

With the pressure mounting across tech to get access to compute, Google is locking in monster partnerships. Last month, the company expanded its partnership with Anthropic in a deal reportedly worth tens of billions.

That agreement will give Anthropic access to more than a gigawatt of AI compute capacity by 2026.

Google has invested $3 billion in Anthropic so far. Even though Amazon remains the company’s main cloud partner, Google is now providing the main infrastructure for future Claude models. Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, said:

“There is such demand for our models that I think the only way we would have been able to serve as much as we’ve been able to this year is this multi-chip strategy.”

That strategy includes TPUs, Trainium, and Nvidia GPUs, and it’s built for performance, cost, and backup. Krieger added that his team had done early prep work to make sure Claude could run smoothly across all major chip types.

“I’ve seen that investment pay off now that we’re able to come online with these massive data centers and meet customers where they are,” he said.

Two months before the Anthropic deal, Google signed a six-year, $10 billion cloud contract with Meta. The company also got a piece of OpenAI’s business as it diversifies away from Microsoft. OpenAI confirmed to Reuters that it’s using Google Cloud but isn’t deploying GPUs there.

This week, Google revealed a new project called Suncatcher, aimed at launching solar-powered satellites equipped with TPUs. The goal is to build a system that harnesses solar energy in space to power compute-intensive AI tasks.

The company said it plans to launch two prototypes by early 2027, calling the experiment a way to minimize pressure on Earth’s resources while preparing for large-scale computation in orbit.

Money flows, demand rises, Nvidia watches

Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s CFO, said the Google owner’s momentum is coming from massive enterprise demand for its full AI stack, including both TPUs and GPUs.

Alphabet now reports that it signed more billion-dollar cloud contracts in the first nine months of 2025 than it did in the previous two years combined.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud unit grew 20% last quarter. AWS CEO Matt Garman said, “Every Trainium 2 chip we land in our data centers today is getting sold and used.” He added that Trainium 3 would bring even more gains in performance and power efficiency.

Still, Google is going all in. It raised its capital expenditure forecast for 2025 to $93 billion, up from $85 billion, with even more spending lined up for 2026. Its stock has jumped 38% in Q3 and another 17% in Q4, its strongest stretch in two decades.

Analysts at Mizuho pointed to the cost and performance advantage of TPUs, noting that although they were originally for internal use, Google is now getting real traction with outside customers. Morgan Stanley also said in a June report that TPU familiarity among developers could be a major boost to Google Cloud growth.

And in a September report, analysts at D.A. Davidson wrote, “We continue to believe that Google’s TPUs remain the best alternative to Nvidia, with the gap between the two closing significantly over the past 9-12 months.”

They also mentioned increasing positive sentiment among developers and suggested Google could even start selling TPU systems directly to AI labs.

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