OpenAI Plans to Buy Google TPUs, Hires for Compiler Role

OpenAI plans to buy Google's AI chips, The Information reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. The shift is striking given Nvidia's long-standing status as OpenAI's single most important silicon supplier. Financial terms and other details of OpenAI's planned purchase couldn't be learned.

The clearest public signal is a job posting. OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer, TPU Compilers in San Francisco, with the listing stating the hire will "lead the optimization" of OpenAI's state-of-the-art frontier models on TPUs. The role, posted on Ashby, covers performance across the full forward pass, from model code through kernels to execution on the hardware, with quantization called out as one lever for inference efficiency.

This escalates a relationship that only recently became public. Reuters reported in June 2025 that OpenAI had begun renting Google Cloud TPUs to run ChatGPT and other products, its first meaningful use of non-Nvidia chips, with the goal of reducing inference costs. Google at the time was not renting its most powerful TPUs to OpenAI. The new reporting suggests OpenAI now wants a deeper commitment to the architecture rather than a short-term capacity patch.

It also fits a hiring pattern. OpenAI appointed Richard Ho, who was senior director of engineering at Google and led development of its Cloud TPUs, to run its hardware division; the new compiler role would presumably sit inside that organization. The infrastructure beat has been crowded lately; our tracker has logged 443 AI-infrastructure stories in the past 90 days, and OpenAI's chip-diversification arc now accounts for several of them.