OpenAI Reportedly Plans to Buy Google TPU Chips, Eyeing Life Beyond Nvidia

OpenAI plans to buy AI chips from Google, according to a person familiar with the matter. The move would loosen its dependence on Nvidia, which supplies most of the hardware behind the AI boom. Neither company has confirmed the plan, and the price, the number of chips and delivery dates have not been disclosed.

The chips in question are Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, processors built specifically for the math that AI models run on. OpenAI reportedly began renting TPUs in June 2025, at the time describing it as early testing with no plans for large-scale deployment. A purchase would mean owning the hardware rather than paying Google by the hour.

Signs of a deeper shift

An OpenAI job listing in San Francisco seeks an engineer to lead the optimization of its frontier models on TPUs. The work involves compilers, the software that translates a model into instructions a specific chip can run, which is why switching chips is harder than swapping parts. Richard Ho, who leads OpenAI's hardware program, spent nearly nine years at Google and was among the leaders of its Cloud TPU project.

OpenAI is also diversifying elsewhere. Nvidia signed a letter of intent in September 2025 to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, tied to at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems, but ended up putting $30 billion into the latest funding round. AMD gave OpenAI the right to buy up to 160 million shares, roughly 10% of the company, tied to the deployment of 6 gigawatts of AMD chips. In June, OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom inference chip built with Broadcom, with initial deployment planned for the end of 2026.

Google's growing TPU business

Google unveiled two eighth-generation TPUs in April, the 8t for training and the 8i for inference, with performance figures measured against its previous chip, Ironwood, not Nvidia hardware. Rival Anthropic signed a deal with Google and Broadcom in April for multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity coming online from 2027.

Alphabet began delivering TPU systems to customers' own data centers in the second quarter, according to its CFO, who expects most of that revenue in 2027. Google Cloud also began offering OpenAI's GPT-6 models to select customers in private preview last week. Alphabet reports third-quarter earnings after the U.S. market closes Wednesday.