Google just stopped playing defense. On April 29, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company will begin selling its Tensor Processing Units directly to select customers’ data centers, a move that transforms Google from a cloud landlord into a full-blown chip merchant. The target list reportedly includes some of Nvidia’s most valuable relationships.
The numbers tell the story
Google’s ambitions here aren’t modest. The company plans to ship 4.3 million TPUs in 2026, then ramp to more than 35 million units by 2028. That’s roughly an eightfold increase in two years.
Morgan Stanley estimates that selling 500,000 TPU chips alone could generate approximately $13 billion in revenue for Google by 2027.
Anthropic, the AI safety lab behind Claude, has reportedly committed to deploying up to one million TPUs and investing in approximately 3.5 gigawatts of power capacity starting in 2027. Meta is also said to be in discussions about substantial TPU commitments.
