The AI market is a battlefield where diverse players like OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Alibaba, and Tencent are engaged in fierce competition. Today, I want to focus on Google and delve into whether they can truly seize hegemony in the AI market in the near future.
1. Google’s Secret Weapon: The 8th Generation TPU
Google recently announced its 8th generation TPU (1). The most significant feature of this generation is the separation into independent chips for training and inference. What particularly caught my attention is the remarkable improvement in inference speed. As highlighted in the red frame, the computation speed has increased approximately tenfold compared to the previous generation. While I found myself wondering, "Can it really get this much faster in just one year?", I am eager to try it out as soon as possible. It is expected to debut later this year.
TPU Performance Comparison
With TPU inference becoming this fast, we might see the same generative AI models produce results significantly quicker when running on TPUs. Currently, among public clouds, only Google Cloud offers the TPU option, which is likely to further boost Google Cloud's competitive edge.
2. Massive Investment in Anthropic
Currently, the most popular frontier model in the AI market is Claude, developed by Anthropic. It is exceptionally strong, particularly in the B2B sector. Recently, Google reportedly committed to a massive investment in Anthropic (up to $40 billion, albeit with conditions) (2). From the perspective of frontier model development, Google and Anthropic are competitors. On the other hand, Anthropic is a major customer for Google Cloud.
Therefore, this massive investment holds significant strategic weight. If the likelihood of Claude’s training and inference being performed on TPUs increases, so does the potential for Google to generate revenue from it. This can be viewed as a form of risk diversification for Google. While it would be ideal if Google’s own frontier model, Gemini, maintained a dominant market share, rivals are constantly launching high-performance models. Practically speaking, it is a rational risk-hedging strategy to have even competing models run on TPUs—thereby collecting Google Cloud usage fees—or to aim for capital gains through equity stakes in those invested companies. In any case, we must keep a close eye on the collaboration between Google and Anthropic.
3. Google DeepMind’s Technical Prowess and Google’s Product Ecosystem
One cannot discuss Google’s AI without mentioning Gemini. Developed by Google DeepMind, this frontier model is natively multimodal and has made headlines for its high performance with every new release. The current model is Gemini 3, and there is anticipation that a next-generation model might be announced at Google I/O, the annual event starting on May 19, 2026. It’s very exciting.
However, Gemini is not the only generative AI from Google DeepMind. Boasting one of the most diverse arrays of models among all AI labs, their portfolio includes image and video generation models, as well as world models like Genie 3 (3).
Furthermore, Google possesses a vast amount of data required for model generation. Google already operates various products globally, and the data harvested from them is immense—YouTube alone is a clear example. Compared to many AI labs that must build their user bases from scratch, Google has an overwhelming advantage. The combination of "Google DeepMind’s technical prowess + data obtained from various products" is unparalleled.
What do you think? Today, we took a deep dive into Google. With powerful technology spanning not just AI model development but various other fields, Google’s strength feels overwhelming. They will likely continue to lead the AI market. Conversely, they are so strong that one might even worry about when they might run afoul of antitrust laws. What are your thoughts?
ToshiStats will continue to cover Google in the future. Stay tuned!
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1) Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era, Google, Apr 23, 2026
2) Google to invest up to $40B in Anthropic in cash and compute, TechCrunch, April 24, 2026
3) Genie 3: A new frontier for world models, Google, August 5, 2025
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