Google Was The Third Biggest Data Center Processor Supplier Last Year: Research

Research firm TechInsights tells CRN that Google’s revenue for data center processors may exceed Intel’s in the near future thanks to the popularity of its Tensor Processing Units and the upcoming launch of its Arm-based Axion CPUs for cloud customers.

Google was the third largest provider of data center processors by revenue last year, just behind Intel and ahead of AMD and, by a larger margin, Amazon Web Services, according to a new report published Tuesday by semiconductor research firm TechInsights.

TechInsights shared select findings from its report with CRN, showing that Google made almost as much money from its data center processors as Intel did from its products while Nvidia accounted for a little more than half of all revenue derived from such chips last year.

[Related: Analysis: How Nvidia Surpassed Intel In Annual Revenue And Won The AI Crown]

The data center processor market, as defined by TechInsights, includes all CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other kinds of processors designed for data centers.

James Sanders, a senior analyst at TechInsights, told CRN that Google accomplished the feat primarily due to its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which the company uses for internal workloads as well as Google Cloud instances.

This puts Google in a very different situation than Intel or Nvidia, which primarily sell processors to customers. Google, on the other hand, is the only user of its TPUs, similar to how AWS is the only user of its Graviton, Trainium and Inferentia data center chips.

“That is quite an accomplishment honestly to become the third largest semiconductor supplier in data centers without selling a single chip. It’s nothing to sneeze at,” he said.

The firm found that Google shipped 2 million TPUs last year, putting it behind only Nvidia when it came to annual shipments of data center accelerator chips, which also include GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) like Google’s TPUs.

Nvidia, on the other hand, shipped 3.8 million data center GPUs, making it the largest supplier for such processors in the segment in 2023.

The remaining companies that design data center accelerator chips—which include Amazon, Intel and AMD, among others—only shipped a total of 500,000 last year.

Since Google does not disclose revenue attributable to TPUs, TechInsights estimated the figure by looking at custom chip design revenue reported by Broadcom—which helps Google design TPUs—and how Google deploys TPUs internally and for cloud customers. The firm then applied a fair market price to Google’s TPUs.

Given that Google plans to deploy its own Arm-based CPUs, called Axion, for cloud customers later this year, Sanders said he wouldn’t be surprised if the company surpasses Intel in data center processor revenue in the near future.

“When you consider that that is on the horizon, it seems likely that Google is going to overtake Intel in the next couple of years,” he said.