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Since 2018, a company that wanted to rent Google's tensor processing units has almost always done it through Google Cloud. Starting in 2027, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will offer the chips from its own data centers, and OpenAI, one of Nvidia's most valuable customers, reportedly plans to buy TPUs as well.
Oracle and Google announced the OCI arrangement Tuesday at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, calling OCI the first hyperscale cloud outside Google to offer TPUs. Capacity arrives in calendar 2027 and ramps over several years. Oracle wouldn't say how big the first deployment will be, but Karan Batta, a senior vice president at OCI, told DCD it is a "multi-year, multi-gigawatt partnership" and that "when Google launches a new TPU, we will have it on day one."
Hours later, on Tuesday evening, The Information reported that OpenAI plans to buy Google's TPUs, citing a person familiar with the matter. Financial terms and other details couldn't be learned, the outlet said. Bloomberg reported the same plan, also citing a person familiar with the matter, and CNBC said it had confirmed it. OpenAI and Google declined to comment to Bloomberg. Nvidia, for its part, has invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI, The Information noted.
How the chips got out of Google's data centers
Google built TPUs for its own use more than a decade ago and began renting them to cloud customers in 2018. Selling the hardware for other people's data centers is much newer. Google opened TPUs to outside facilities in the second quarter, CNBC reported this morning, and The Information names Fluidstack as one of the companies running them. Google is also working with Blackstone on Crux AI, a U.S.-based TPU cloud, and DCD said Oracle could be first to bring TPUs online outside Google's platform depending on which one launches sooner. |
