Nvidia-Google AI Chip Rivalry Escalates on Report of Meta Talks

Meta Platforms Inc. is in talks to spend billions on Google’s AI chips, the Information reported, adding to a monthslong share rally as the search giant has made the case it can rival Nvidia Corp. as a leader in artificial intelligence technology.
A deal would signal growing momentum for Google’s chips and long-term potential to challenge Nvidia’s market dominance, after the company earlier agreed to supply up to 1 million chips to Anthropic PBC. Bloomberg's Mandeep Singh joins to discuss with Paul Sweeney and Scarlet Fu.

Since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, analysts and technologists — even a Google engineer and the company’s former chief executive — have declared Google behind in the high-stakes race to develop artificial intelligence.
Not anymore.
The internet giant has released new AI software and struck deals, such as a chip tie-up with Anthropic PBC, that have reassured investors the company won’t easily lose to ChatGPT creator OpenAI and other rivals. Google’s newest multi-purpose model, Gemini 3, won immediate praise for its capabilities in reasoning and coding, as well as niche tasks that have tripped up AI chatbots. Google’s cloud business, once an also-ran, is growing steadily, thanks in part to the global rush to develop AI services and demand for compute.
And there are signs of rising demand for Google’s specialized AI chips, one of the few viable alternatives to Nvidia Corp.’s dominant gear. A report on Monday that Meta Platforms Inc. is in talks to use Google’s chips sent shares of its parent Alphabet Inc. soaring. The stock has added nearly $1 trillion in market capitalization since mid-October, helped by Warren Buffett taking a $4.9 billion stake during the third quarter and broader Wall Street enthusiasm for its AI efforts.
Google owner Alphabet Inc.’s shares rose as much as 3.22% in New York on Tuesday. The company is on track to hit a $4 trillion market capitalization for the first time.
SoftBank Group, one of OpenAI’s biggest backers, fell to a two-month low on Tuesday on worries about the competition from Google’s Gemini. Nvidia shares fell as much as 5.51% on Tuesday, erasing $243 billion in market value.
“Google has arguably always been the dark horse in this AI race,” said Neil Shah, analyst and cofounder at Counterpoint Research. It’s “a sleeping giant that is now fully awake.”
For years, Google executives have argued that deep, costly research would help the company fend off rivals, defend its turf as the leading search engine and invent the computing platforms of tomorrow. Then ChatGPT came along, presenting the first real threat to Google search in years, even though Google pioneered the tech underpinning OpenAI’s chatbot. Still, Google has plenty of resources that OpenAI doesn’t: a corpus of ready data to train and refine AI models; flowing profits; and its own computing infrastructure. 

“We’ve taken a full, deep, full-stack approach to AI,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer for Google and Alphabet, told investors last quarter. “And that really plays out.”
Any concerns that Google might be held back by regulators are dying away. The company recently avoided the most severe outcome from a US anti-monopoly case — a breakup of its business — in part because of the perceived threat from AI newcomers. And the search giant has shown some progress in the longtime effort to diversify beyond its core business. Waymo, Alphabet’s driverless car unit, is coming to several new cities and just added freeway driving to its taxi service, a feat made possible by the company’s enormous research and investment.
Some of Google’s edge comes from its economics. It’s one of the few companies that produces what the industry calls the full stack in computing. Google makes the AI apps people use, like its popular Nano Banana image generator, as well as the software models, the cloud computing architecture and the chips underneath. The company also has a data goldmine for constructing AI models from its search index, Android phones and YouTube — data that Google often keeps for itself. That means, in theory, Google has more control over the technical direction of AI products and doesn’t necessarily have to pay suppliers, unlike OpenAI.


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