Google is building a four-partner chip supply chain to challenge Nvidia in AI inference

Summary: Google is building the AI industry’s most diversified custom chip supply chain, with four design partners (Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, Intel) and a roadmap stretching from the Ironwood TPU now shipping in the millions to TPU v8 chips at TSMC 2nm in late 2027. The strategy, detailed ahead of Google Cloud Next, splits the next generation explicitly: Broadcom’s “Sunfish” for training, MediaTek’s “Zebrafish” for inference at 20-30% lower cost, with Marvell in talks to add a memory processing unit and an additional inference TPU, positioning Google’s custom silicon as the most direct challenge to Nvidia’s dominance in AI inference.

Google is assembling the most diversified custom chip supply chain in the AI industry, with four design partners, a fabrication relationship with TSMC, and a product roadmap that now stretches from the inference chips it is shipping today to the 2-nanometre processors it expects to deploy ...