OpenAI plans to buy Google's artificial intelligence chips, according to a report by The Information on Tuesday, cited by Reuters. The report, which relies on a person familiar with the matter, says the ChatGPT maker intends to purchase Google's Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, as technology companies keep ramping up spending on data centers and semiconductors to meet surging demand for AI computing.
No financial terms or other details were disclosed in the report. Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours, and OpenAI declined to comment, so the size and timing of any purchase remain unconfirmed for now.
Even as a plan rather than a signed deal, the move would deepen an increasingly tangled relationship between two of the fiercest rivals in AI. OpenAI and Alphabet's Google compete directly in AI products and in search, yet the economics of building and running large models keep pushing them toward cooperation. Just last week, OpenAI said it would make its frontier AI models available through Google Cloud, and Reuters has previously reported that the two companies struck a cloud deal last year giving OpenAI more computing capacity.
The chip angle matters because hardware is where the AI race is won or lost. OpenAI is already among the largest buyers of Nvidia's graphics processing units, the GPUs it uses to train its models and run inference computing for hundreds of millions of users. Reuters reported back in June 2025 that OpenAI had begun renting Google's AI chips, so a purchase would extend a test that has apparently gone well.
For Google, the reported sale is another sign that its custom silicon has become a real business rather than an internal tool. TPUs have gained traction as an alternative to Nvidia's market-leading AI chips, as companies look for cheaper options and for processors well suited to running AI models. Google began selling TPUs directly to some customers this year, and deals with customers including rival Anthropic have fueled demand for the chips. Alphabet's chief financial officer, Anat Ashkenazi, has previously said the company expects to begin recognizing a small percentage of revenue from TPU sales agreements by the end of this year, with the vast majority expected to be recognized in 2027.
The timing adds one more storyline to a busy Wednesday. Alphabet reports its quarterly results later today, and investors will be looking for signs that its heavy investment in AI is continuing to drive growth in its cloud business. More broadly, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet together plan to spend as much as 600 billion dollars this year on AI infrastructure, even as investors increasingly question when that spending will translate into meaningful returns.
If the purchase goes ahead, it would underline how fluid the AI industry's alliances have become. The company that defined the chatbot era would be buying silicon from the search giant it is trying to disrupt, while both keep spending at a scale that would have seemed implausible a few years ago. For Nvidia, it is another reminder that its biggest customers are also its most motivated would-be alternatives — and that the market for AI chips is big enough, for now, to reward more than one winner.