OpenAI plans to buy Google's TPU chips outright, report says

OpenAI plans to buy Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) directly, The Information reported on October 27, according to a Reuters account of the report. The report, citing a person familiar with the matter, did not disclose financial terms or other details of the planned purchase. OpenAI declined to comment, and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside regular business hours.

From renting to buying

The move would mark a further shift in OpenAI's computing supply. OpenAI is one of the largest buyers of Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), which it uses to train models and run inference. Reuters reported in June 2025 that OpenAI had begun renting Google's TPUs, its first meaningful use of non-Nvidia chips, aimed at cutting inference costs. Google began selling TPUs directly to some customers this year, rather than only renting computing power through its cloud. A public job listing also shows OpenAI hiring a TPU compiler engineer in San Francisco to optimize its frontier models for TPUs, and its hardware division is led by Richard Ho, formerly senior director of engineering for Google's Cloud TPUs.

What to watch

If completed, the purchase would deepen ties between two companies that still compete in AI products and search, and would signal that Google's in-house chips are becoming a credible alternative to Nvidia's market-leading hardware. Alphabet, Google's parent, reports quarterly results on Wednesday, with investors watching whether its heavy AI spending keeps driving growth in its cloud business. For now, the plan remains a reported one: neither company has formally confirmed it.