Google's own AI chips are headed to a rival's cloud. Oracle and Google announced on Tuesday, Oct. 27, that Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, will be available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the service through which Oracle rents computing power to businesses over the internet, starting in 2027. The two companies say Oracle will be the first big cloud company outside Google to offer them, though Google said in April that it would start selling the chips to a select group of customers, according to a news report. Google is also building a separate cloud service for its chips with the investment firm Blackstone, and that service could come online first, according to the same report.
TPUs are chips Google designs itself for AI, drawing on more than a decade of work, and the companies say they train and run Google's Gemini models across products that each have a billion or more users. The companies also say the world's demand for the computing power it takes to train and run AI is bigger than any one cloud company can supply.
The companies say Oracle's cloud will offer TPUs alongside GPUs, advanced AI chips that AI models are trained and run on. Oracle says having several kinds of chip in one cloud lets customers pick the right one for the cost and speed each job needs. The companies also say businesses could run AI right next to the company data they already keep in Oracle's databases, without the cost of moving it between clouds.
Oracle will supply the power, cooling and networking in its own data centers, and the companies say capacity will grow over several years starting in 2027. Google's newest TPUs come in two designs, the TPU 8t for training AI models and the TPU 8i for running them, but the companies have not said which chips Oracle will offer first.
The exact size of the deal is not public. Oracle declined to say how large the first installation will be, according to a news report. An Oracle executive told reporters the deal would be a "multi-year, multi-gigawatt partnership with Google." A gigawatt is a measure of electric power, so the figure describes how much electricity the data centers running the chips would draw. The executive also said Oracle would have each new Google TPU on the day Google launches it.
Neither company has said what renting the chips on Oracle will cost, which customers have signed up, or how Oracle's prices will compare with Google's own cloud. The chips are not available yet, and the companies' plans for 2027 could still change.