Google is making an ambitious play for a major stake in chips that power AI, using Nvidia’s playbook.
Google has been demonstrating how it can use Nvidia’s playbook to win customers by hosting an AI data center cluster called Lake Mariner.
Alphabet-owned Google has provided a $3.2 billion financial guarantee for the project, whose developers will rent the computing power from thousands of its microprocessors to the AI giant Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter.
It is the same strategy Nvidia has used time and again to stoke already-blazing demand for its own artificial-intelligence chips.
Until recently, Nvidia had that market all but to itself, with its graphics processing units (GPUs) coveted by tech companies for their power to train and run AI models.
As the AI race has morphed over the past year into a contest for computing resources, challengers have begun to edge in—none of them more formidable than Google.
“You have all these very well-capitalized companies who are big believers that this market around compute is going to have tremendous value,” said Nazar Khan, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of the AI infrastructure company TeraWulf, which is developing Lake Mariner with FluidStack, a Google-backed cloud provider, to WSJ. “They want to be in the game; they don’t want to be left behind.”
Google has been demonstrating how it can use Nvidia’s playbook to win customers by hosting an AI data center cluster called Lake Mariner.
Alphabet-owned Google has provided a $3.2 billion financial guarantee for the project, whose developers will rent the computing power from thousands of its microprocessors to the AI giant Anthropic, according to people familiar with the matter.
It is the same strategy Nvidia has used time and again to stoke already-blazing demand for its own artificial-intelligence chips.
Until recently, Nvidia had that market all but to itself, with its graphics processing units (GPUs) coveted by tech companies for their power to train and run AI models.
As the AI race has morphed over the past year into a contest for computing resources, challengers have begun to edge in—none of them more formidable than Google.
“You have all these very well-capitalized companies who are big believers that this market around compute is going to have tremendous value,” said Nazar Khan, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of the AI infrastructure company TeraWulf, which is developing Lake Mariner with FluidStack, a Google-backed cloud provider, to WSJ. “They want to be in the game; they don’t want to be left behind.”