Google shares jump on new TPU 8 chips, enterprise agent platform, and partnership with Nvidia
The raft of announcements from Google’s Cloud Next ’26 event sent shares up in early trading.
Google rolled out a flurry of announcements at its Cloud Next ’26 event this morning, pushing shares up over 1.5% in early trading.
The company announced its new eighth-generation TPU chips: the TPU 8t, for training, and the TPU 8i, for inference. Earlier generations of TPU chips were used for both training and inference, but now each of those two tasks is handled by distinct hardware.
Google’s chips have been continually improving over a decade of development and have emerged as a popular alternative to market leader Nvidia’s GPUs, which dominated the first wave of generative-AI model development. Anthropic recently announced a partnership with Google to access 3.5 gigawatts of TPU computing starting in 2027.
Google also announced a new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which replaces its Vertex AI product.
Google isn’t exactly going head-to-head with Nvidia’s much more powerful chips — and it’s still offering them as part of Google Cloud to customers.
Google and Nvidia also announced a partnership to deploy the most advanced Vera Rubin chips on Google Cloud via Google’s A5X next-gen AI infrastructure.
