Google is making more of its own chips, rolling out new hardware that can handle everything from YouTube advertising to big data analysis as the company tries to combat rising artificial-intelligence costs. The new chip, called Axion, adds to Google’s efforts stretching back more than a decade to develop new computing resources, beginning with specialized chips used for AI work. Google has leaned into that strategy since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT kicked off an arms race that has threatened its dominant position as a gateway to the internet. The chip efforts promise to reduce Google’s reliance on outside vendors and bring it into competition with longtime partners such as Intel and Nvidia, analysts said. Google officials said they didn’t view it as a competition. “I see this as a basis for growing the size of the pie,” said Amin Vahdat, the Google vice president overseeing the company’s in-house chip operations. Google’s larger competitors in the cloud, Amazon.com and Microsoft, have also poured money into making their own chips as the AI boom has intensified demand for computing resources. Google owed much of its early success to an investment in the chips necessary to fuel the company’s web search algorithm. That often meant piecing together cheap, commercially available hardware in novel ways. The boom in AI and its need for vastly more computing resources has pushed Google further in the direction of custom solutions. It has credited specialized AI chips it built, known as tensor processing units, or TPUs, with helping save money on services that make heavy use of AI.
Full report : Google looks to new Axion artificial intelligence processor to cut down costs and keep competition at bay.