Skip to main content

Nvidia CEO: Google is only customer building its own silicon at scale

According to a new report via CNBC, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, claims that Google is the only customer of the chipmaker that is building its own silicon at scale.

A lot of the tech industry relies heavily on Nvidia for graphics cards and discreet graphics for their hardware and projects. Huang told CNBC that of the companies that have started their own chip development, Google is the only company doing it at any sort of scale.

“There’s really one I know of that have silicon that’s really in production,” Huang told CNBC. “That company would be Google.”

The catalyst for this boost in production and development is arguably the move by Google into data center AI chip making in 2016. These high-performance chips offer performance advantages over similar graphics cards that were available at the time. These Google-developed chips are not available to other companies, though.

They have, however, offered various products that use the Edge tensor processing unit chips. These are not quite as powerful as the TPU chips that Google uses to train AI models within the current cloud services. Amazon follows a similar principle, only using its own AI chips within its data centers to deliver services for third-party developers.

Nvidia does not appear to be involved with the upcoming Stadia project, with Google choosing AMD to develop custom GPUs to ensure that the cloud gaming system runs as smoothly as possible with the wealth of gaming titles.

Given the investment in data centers from across the industry, Google investing heavily in its own silicon will arguably help give the company a distinct advantage over the growing volume of competitors.

More on Google:

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

You’re reading 9to5Google — experts who break news about Google and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Google on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news:

Comments

Author

Avatar for Damien Wilde Damien Wilde

Damien is a UK-based video producer for 9to5Google. Find him on Twitter: @iamdamienwilde. Email: damien@9to5mac.com