Google and Intel deepen AI infrastructure partnership | TechCrunch

In Brief Posted: 11:27 AM PDT · April 9, 2026 Image Credits:Alex Kraus/Bloomberg / Getty Images Rebecca Szkutak Google and Intel deepen AI infrastructure partnership Google and Intel announced an expanded multi-year partnership on Thursday for Google Cloud to continue utilizing Intel AI infrastructure and to keep developing processors together. Google Cloud will use Intel’s Xeon processors, including Intel’s latest Xeon 6 chips, for AI, cloud, and inference tasks. The company has used Intel’s various Xeon processors for decades. The companies will also expand the co-development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs), which help accelerate and manage data center tasks by offloading them from CPUs. This chip development partnership, which started in 2021, will focus on custom ASIC-based IPUs. Intel declined to share any information regarding pricing for the deal. This expansion comes as the industry is hungry for CPUs. While GPUs are used for developing and training AI models, CPUs are crucial for running AI models and within general AI infrastructure. “AI is reshaping how infrastructure is built and scaled,” Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan said in a company press release. “Scaling AI requires more than accelerators — it requires balanced systems. CPUs and IPUs are central to delivering the performance, efficiency and flexibility modern AI workloads demand.” More companies have been turning their focus to CPUs in recent months as there is a growing shortage for th...