OpenAI Plans to Buy Google's AI Chips as It Looks Beyond Nvidia: Report
OpenAI plans to buy AI chips from Google, according to a person who knows about the plan and spoke to The Information. This move would help OpenAI depend less on Nvidia, the company that supplies much of the hardware used in the AI boom.
Neither company has confirmed the plan. The price, number of chips, and delivery dates have not been announced. OpenAI is one of Nvidia's biggest customers.
The chips OpenAI reportedly wants to buy are Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs. These chips are designed to do one main job: perform the calculations that AI models need. Google introduced the chip in 2016 and said it had already been using TPUs in its data centers for more than a year.
Reports in June 2025 said OpenAI had started renting Google's TPUs. At the time, the company described this as early testing and said it had no plans to use the chips on a large scale. Buying the chips would mean owning the hardware instead of paying Google to use it by the hour. Other details about the plan have not been made public.
An job listing for a position in San Francisco asks an engineer to lead efforts to make OpenAI's most advanced models run better on TPUs. This gives more weight to the reports. The job involves working on compilers, which are software tools that turn an AI model into instructions a particular chip can understand. This helps explain why changing chips is harder than simply swapping one part for another.
Richard Ho, who leads OpenAI's hardware program, worked at Google for almost nine years. Before joining OpenAI, he was one of the leaders of Google's Cloud TPU project.
In September 2025, Nvidia signed a letter of intent to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as OpenAI began using at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems. A gigawatt equals one billion watts. Data center builders now use this unit to describe the size of their projects.
Two weeks later, AMD gave OpenAI the right to buy up to 160 million AMD shares, or about 10% of the company. This deal depends on OpenAI using 6 gigawatts of AMD chips.
Nvidia eventually invested $30 billion in an OpenAI funding round, much less than the $100 billion mentioned in the letter of intent. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in March that this might be the company's last investment of this kind before OpenAI becomes a publicly traded company.
In June, OpenAI introduced Jalapeño, its first custom chip, developed with Broadcom. The chip is designed for inference, the stage when a trained AI model produces answers. OpenAI plans to start using it by the end of 2026.
In April, Google introduced two eighth-generation TPUs. The 8t is designed to train AI models, while the 8i is designed to run trained models and produce results, a process called inference. Google's performance figures compare these chips with its previous-generation chip, Ironwood, rather than with Nvidia's hardware.
Anthropic, OpenAI's main rival, signed an agreement with Google and Broadcom in April for several gigawatts of capacity using next-generation TPUs. Anthropic expects this capacity to become available starting in 2027.
According to Alphabet's chief financial officer, the company began delivering TPU systems to customers for use in their own data centers in the second quarter. Google Cloud also began offering OpenAI's GPT-6 models to a limited group of customers in a private preview last week.