OpenAI has reportedly started leasing Google's TPU chips to handle inference for ChatGPT and other services. The move marks its first major compute shift beyond Nvidia hardware, aiming to rein in spiraling inference costs and diversify a single-vendor supply chain.
Google just officially named and released pre-trained weights for AlphaChip, its reinforcement learning system that treats chip floorplanning like a board game. The AI generates superhuman circuit layouts in hours instead of months, and has already designed Google's last three TPU generations as well as MediaTek chips. Why it matters: AI is no longer just running on advanced silicon—it is actively redesigning the hardware that powers it.
