Google puts a crack in fortress Nvidia

JENSEN HUANG DIDN'T earn the nickname “Godfather of AI” for nothing.

- DAVE LEE Bloomberg

With demand for chips made by Nvidia greatly outstripping supply, the company’s chief executive officer has been able to name his price for them.

Through a web of investments, AI companies big and small are firmly in his pocket. Even to the world’s wealthiest men, Huang’s the don. “I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs,” Oracle Founder Larry Ellison said of one meeting in 2024.

That’s why news of Google’s discussions to sell “billions of dollars” of its own AI chips to Meta Platforms had the feel of a plot; not to ambush Huang at the grocer but to demonstrate his grip on the AI hardware sector could be under threat.

A deal with Meta could lead Mark Zuckerberg’s company to install Google’s chips in its own datacentres by 2027, The Information reported on Monday, and rent them from Google Cloud as soon as next year. Google’s coup would follow a similar move to provide up to one million of its chips—known as Tensor Processing Units—to leading Al startup Anthropic, creator of the Claude chatbot.