Most AI chips are general-purpose. You load a model onto them, and they run it. Google is reportedly trying something stranger: a chip that is the model, with Gemini’s blueprint etched into the hardware itself.
The project, informally called “Frozen v2,” was reported by The Information and picked up by Reuters and Bloomberg Law. Alphabet shares rose as much as 3.7% on the news. Google has not confirmed the project, and the chip is years away. But the idea behind it is a serious bet on where AI infrastructure goes next.
What ‘frozen’ means
Today’s chips keep the model in memory and shuttle its data back and forth. That flexibility costs power and time.
Frozen v2 would bake Gemini’s neural-network architecture straight into the circuitry. The hardware locks to the shape of Google’s current AI design. Engineers can still refresh the model by loading new weights, but the underlying structure stays fixed, or “frozen.” How much of the model gets hardwired is reportedly still being decided.
