Google and Intel on Thursday announced an expansion of a multi-year partnership that will see Google Cloud continue to leverage Intel AI infrastructure and continue joint development of processors.
Google Cloud uses Intel’s Xeon processors, including Intel’s latest Xeon 6 chips, for AI, cloud, and inference tasks. The company has used a variety of Intel’s Xeon processors for decades.
The companies will also expand their joint development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs) that help data centers accelerate and manage tasks by offloading them from the CPU.
Launched in 2021, this chip development partnership will focus on custom ASIC-based IPUs.
Intel declined to share information about the deal’s price.
This expansion comes at a time when the industry is hungry for CPUs. GPUs are used for developing and training AI models, while CPUs are important for running AI models and within general AI infrastructure.
“AI is reshaping the way we build and scale infrastructure,” Intel CEO Lip Vu Tan said in the company’s press release. “Scaling AI requires more than just accelerators; it requires a balanced system. CPUs and IPUs play a central role in delivering the performance, efficiency, and flexibility that modern AI workloads demand.”
In recent months, more companies have focused on CPUs as the chip shortage worsens.
Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank, recently unveiled the Arm AGI CPU, the first chip the semiconductor giant produced itself amidst global demand for CPUs.
