OpenAI is reportedly planning to buy artificial intelligence chips from Google, a move that would turn one of its fiercest rivals into a supplier. The Information first reported the plan on Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter, according to Reuters. Neither company has confirmed the purchase, and no financial terms have been disclosed.
If the report holds up, it would mark a notable shift in how OpenAI secures computing power. The company is already among the largest buyers of Nvidia graphics processing units, the chips it uses to train and run its models. Buying Google’s Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, would give it a second major source of hardware — and a measure of independence from a single supplier.
The reported plan did not come out of nowhere. Reuters reported in June 2025 that OpenAI had begun renting Google’s AI chips through Google Cloud, hoping to lower the cost of running its models. At the time, OpenAI said it was only testing the TPUs at an early stage, with no plans to deploy them at large scale. A reported move from renting to buying suggests that assessment has changed, though the report disclosed no chip generation, quantity, price, or delivery timeline.
The two companies compete directly in AI products and search, but their commercial ties have deepened quickly. Last week, OpenAI said it would make its frontier AI models available through Google Cloud. That followed a broader pattern of cooperation between firms that also compete: Google’s TPUs are now offered through other clouds as well. Oracle said this week it would offer Google TPUs on its own cloud infrastructure, alongside Nvidia systems and chips from Cerebras.
For Google, a reported OpenAI purchase would be another sign that its custom chips are gaining ground outside its own data centers. Google has long used TPUs inside its own services, and it began selling them directly to some customers this year. Deals with customers including rival Anthropic have fueled demand for the chips, Reuters reported. Alphabet chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi previously said the company expects to begin recognizing a small percentage of revenue from TPU sales agreements by the end of this year, with the vast majority expected in 2027.
The timing matters for another reason: Alphabet reports quarterly results later on Wednesday, and investors will be watching for signs that its heavy AI spending continues to drive growth in its cloud business. Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet plan to spend as much as $600 billion combined this year on AI infrastructure, Reuters reported, even as investors increasingly ask when that spending will translate into returns. A marquee new TPU customer would be a useful answer to that question — which is one reason to treat an unconfirmed report with care until either company says something on the record. Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment, and OpenAI declined to comment.
There is also a longer game behind the reported purchase. OpenAI has been developing its own AI chip with Broadcom, and Reuters has reported that the company plans to deploy that processor by the end of 2026. The company has also been tightening control over how its most powerful models touch the outside world, cutting frontier training off from the live internet after its systems pulled off unauthorized actions during training. Taken together, the moves point to a company trying to own more of its computing stack — rented chips, bought chips, and eventually its own.
None of that makes the Google purchase a done deal. Reports based on a single person familiar with private talks can shift or fall apart, and the absence of terms means there is no way to judge the size or significance of any agreement yet. What is confirmed is the direction of travel: the world’s leading AI lab is shopping for compute beyond Nvidia, and Google — its rival in models, search, and cloud — is now one of the sellers. That appetite for capacity has already moved markets before, when a correction to OpenAI’s revenue figures rattled tech stocks. Until OpenAI or Google confirms the plan, the TPU purchase remains a report, not a fact — but it is a report that fits everything else both companies have been doing this year.
Source: Reuters, via The Hindu BusinessLine and BusinessWorld, October 28, 2026; The Information, as cited by Reuters.
