OpenAI plans to procure Google TPU chips and hire an engineer to lead optimization

One of Nvidia's most important customers is placing orders with its competitor.

On October 27, according to The Information citing people familiar with the matter, OpenAI plans to purchase Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips.

This is an important breakthrough for Google's chip business. Google TPU has long been seen as a potential challenger to Nvidia GPUs in the AI computing power market, and OpenAI is one of Nvidia's most valuable customers.

At the same time, OpenAI has posted a job listing seeking an engineer to "lead" the optimization of its most advanced frontier models on TPUs—indicating that the related efforts have entered a substantive phase.

Nvidia and OpenAI: A Deep Tie of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars

OpenAI's relationship with Nvidia is extremely close.

In August this year, Nvidia agreed to provide more than $100 billion in credit support for OpenAI's planned large data center project in Ohio, which will fully adopt Nvidia's chip architecture.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wrote in a blog at the time that OpenAI has committed to spending about $600 billion by 2030 to use Nvidia servers.

However, this has not stopped OpenAI from seeking diversified supply.

Not the First Attempt, but This Time Further

According to a report by The Information last year, OpenAI had begun using Google TPUs to reduce its dependence on Nvidia chips. Upon the news, Jensen Huang acted quickly, and Nvidia and OpenAI subsequently reached a new agreement. An OpenAI spokesperson said at the time that the company "currently has no plans to specifically use TPUs."

Now, that statement is a thing of the past.

The job listing posted by OpenAI this time shows that the related work is still in its early stages. The job description states that the position will have "broad technical leadership" over the entire optimization effort, and notes that "experience in TPU training or inference is welcome, as is a solid foundation in optimizing real workloads on TPUs."

Google TPU: From Internal Use to External Expansion

Google has been developing TPUs for more than a decade and claims they are more efficient than Nvidia GPUs.

For years, Google has rented TPUs to external customers through its own cloud infrastructure, with users including Anthropic (which has used TPUs to train models), Apple, and trading firms such as Citadel Securities as well as numerous startups. Recently, Google began selling TPUs directly to other data center operators, initially targeting emerging cloud service providers such as Fluidstack.

On the same day, Google announced that Oracle will become the first major cloud service provider to rent TPUs to customers. According to people familiar with the matter, Oracle is buying these chips directly, and the end user will be a major customer shared by both companies, but the specific identity is not yet clear.

It is worth noting that OpenAI itself is an important cloud customer of Oracle. Last week, it just announced that it will offer its model services through Google Cloud, and it had previously been renting Nvidia chips through Google Cloud. Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer

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