Google's TPU Blitz Takes Aim at Nvidia While CEO Scandal Sinks Stock

Nvidia slid more than 4% Monday to its lowest close since April 7, as the board looks into CEO Jensen Huang's relationship with an alleged Chinese spy. The drop came even as chip stocks rallied hard, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF up more than 7%. Alphabet gained about 1%.

Google used the same day to reveal two new tensor processing units: the TPU 8tx and TPU 8i Max. They join the 8t and 8i unveiled in April, marking the first time Google has introduced four TPU systems in one year. Both new chips ship next year. The 8tx keeps data encrypted for governments, banks and other regulated buyers, paired with AMD processors, while the 8i Max squeezes two chips into one package for requests with long context windows.

The forecasts are loud. Bloomberg Intelligence expects TPU sales to top $135 billion by 2028, up from about $12 billion this year, and that excludes chips rented through Google Cloud. Epoch AI estimates TPU shipments doubled in computing power in a single quarter this year, hitting roughly 800,000 chips. Google used to roll out about one data center TPU a year; now it has one for every job.

Anthropic leads the buyer list. Its IPO filing shows about $161 billion in lease payments tied to TPUs, which Raymond James says makes it the biggest custom-chip customer of Google's design partner, Broadcom. Meta, OpenAI and Oracle are buyers too.

Nvidia still owns raw speed. Its next-generation Rubin chip is rated at 35 petaflops, against about 10 for Google's 8i and about 20 for the 8i Max, according to Yahoo Finance calculations. But SemiAnalysis found Google's Ironwood TPU delivers up to nearly three times as much AI output per dollar as Nvidia's Blackwell chips when running AI agents, though Nvidia's top system wins when speed is everything. Nvidia's data center business reached $115 billion in fiscal 2025, nearly eight times the $15 billion it posted in fiscal 2023.