AI research wiki
hardware · 2026-10-28 · Tier 1

TPUs leave Google; memory is sold out to 2028

TPUs leave Google; memory is sold out to 2028

TL;DR. In one day, Google's TPU went from an in-house chip to a merchant product. Oracle will be the first hyperscaler outside Google to offer TPUs from its own data centers, deploying from calendar 2027 (Oracle supplies power, cooling and networking; Google claims 12.6 PFLOPS FP4 per 8th-gen chip, >97% productive time on large training runs, up to 80% better performance per dollar for low-latency serving, and a TorchTPU stack that runs PyTorch, vLLM and SGLang without rewrites). OpenAI, long Nvidia's marquee customer, plans to buy TPUs (The Information, Bloomberg); its chip lead Richard Ho previously worked on TPUs. Anthropic's S-1 quantifies the demand: $114.5B planned with Google Cloud, another $125-150B possible on TPUs with Google and others, and $161.2B for TPU compute with Broadcom. On memory, SK hynix reported a record Q3 (86% gross margin, DRAM ASP +28% QoQ, NAND +25%) and says it signed 5-year agreements with 14 customers covering over 50% of 2027-2028 capacity, with memory demand outpacing supply through 2030. Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance are reportedly seeking 10-year DDR5/LPDDR5 contracts.

Why it matters

  • The serving-cost lever moves from GPU pricing to accelerator choice. Google's 80% perf/$ claim is for low-latency serving, the decode regime where custom silicon competes (Trainium3 note, 10-24).
  • Memory, not FLOPs, is the binding input: H200 rents rose 160% vs 40% for H100 (10-24), and SK hynix is now pre-selling two years out.
  • Onsemi is in talks to buy Ferric (~$1B), after Analog Devices bought Empower ($1.5B, May): power delivery for AI chips is the next consolidation target.

Relation to prior wiki pages

  • Compute economics: 10-27's S-1 entry noted ~$115B of Google TPU commitments; today adds Broadcom's $161.2B and a second and third TPU buyer.
  • Memory hierarchy: HBM capacity displacing commodity DRAM is the mechanism behind the 10-year contract push.

Sources: The Information: TPU moment · OpenAI buys TPUs · Oracle TPU details · SK hynix Q3 · Onsemi/Ferric