Shares of Alphabet jumped Tuesday after The Information reported that Meta Platforms is weighing a move to adopt Google-designed chips—a potential shake-up in the fast-moving artificial intelligence hardware race.
According to the report, Meta is evaluating Google’s highly customized tensor processing units for deployment in its data centers by 2027, a deal that could be worth billions. Meta may also begin renting TPUs from Google Cloud as early as next year.
Alphabet stock rose 1.6 percent on the news, while rival chipmakers stumbled: Nvidia slid 4.2 percent and AMD dropped 2.6 percent, reflecting investor jitters over new competition from Google’s in-house silicon.
Google introduced its first TPU in 2018 for internal cloud workloads and has since rolled out increasingly powerful versions built for AI training and inference.
If Meta ultimately adopts the TPUs, it would mark a major victory for Google—and a strong endorsement of its long-running bet on custom AI hardware.
