Google is preparing to form a partnership with Taiwan’s Media Tek, a chip-maker company. Google has long been working on its own AI chips to reduce costs as well as dependence on expansive chips from Nvidia. Google announced its first Tensor Processing Unit AI chip in 2016 after using it in-house for approximately one year.
Google has been using Broadcom as a partner for developing TPUs since the beginning. Still, the relationship took a turn for the worse and reports were coming out that Google was looking for alternatives. One of the reasons was the hard bargaining of Broadcom. Media Tek charges less per chip as compared to Broadcom. On top of that, it has a strong relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).
However, there is no news of Google cutting ties with Broadcom at the time being. Google released the sixth-generation TPU late last year. Google has been using its TPUs in-house as well as for its cloud-based customers to reduce its dependence on Nvidia’s chips. Google spent between $6 to $9 billion on TPUs last year, according to Omida.
Broadcom has been one of the leading companies in AI chip research. Apart from its close relationship with Google, it has been working with many leading tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and Apple for the development of AI chips.
