Google has started selling TPUs, but still keeps most for itself

Google has started selling its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to customers for the first time, delivering them to customer data centers in the second quarter, CFO Anat Ashkenazi disclosed during Alphabet's earnings call on Wednesday. The company recognized a small amount of revenue from TPU orders but expects more in 2027, while CEO Sundar Pichai said Google will scale up sales based on demand and allocation needs for frontier model development, keeping most TPUs for internal use or Google Cloud.

Some lucky customers took delivery of their own Tensor Processing Units TPU https://www.networkworld.com/article/4093957/what-are-tpus-your-guide-to-tensor-processing-units-and-ai-acceleration.html s , custom chips developed by Google for AI applications, in the second quarter, company executives disclosed during a call to discuss its latest financial results on Wednesday. The disclosure comes at a time when enterprises are grappling with a global shortage of high-end GPUs that is driving up costs and slowing AI deployment timelines, and even those who have GPUs don’t always have electricity to operate them https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/03/altman-and-nadella-need-more-power-for-ai-but-theyre-not-sure-how-much/ . “We delivered to customer data centers for the first time in Q2,” said Anat Ashkenazi https://www.linkedin.com/in/anat-a-a334433/ , CFO of Google’s parent Alphabet, adding that the company had begun to recognize a small amount of revenue from TPU orders, although it expected to recognize more in 2027. Ashkenazi did not name the customers or describe the commercial arrangements, leaving open questions about whether the systems are being deployed by large enterprises, governments, sovereign AI initiatives, or other cloud providers. Until recently, Google’s TPU strategy centered on giving customers access to the chips through Google Cloud, while using the same silicon internally to power its own AI models and services. But during the company’s last earnings call in April, just days after it released two new TPU models https://www.networkworld.com/article/4162004/google-bets-on-workload-specific-tpus-with-8t-and-8i-launch.html , CEO Sundar Pichai https://blog.google/authors/sundar-pichai/ said Google would consider selling TPUs to AI labs, capital markets firms, and high-performance computing applications. On Wednesday’s call, Pichai said Google will scale up TPU sales “based on the opportunities we see and the demand we see, commensurate with the constraints that exist and the allocation needs we have for frontier model development.” But Google is still keeping the bulk of its TPUs for itself, either for internal use or to rent out through Google Cloud Platform. “Our first priority is making sure we are allocating what we need to compete at the frontier in terms of AGI development,” Pichai said on Wednesday’s call. “We are using both TPUs and GPUs mainly for serving our models.”