April 9 (Reuters) – Intel and Google have expanded their partnership to advance the use of artificial intelligence-focused central processing units and \u200cto develop custom infrastructure processors, as shifting use of AI \u200cdrives renewed demand for traditional computing chips.<\/p>\n
Companies are increasingly moving away from using AI \u200bfor training models to deploying them, fueling the need for generalist CPU chips designed to handle heavy workloads.<\/p>\n
Under the agreement, announced on Thursday, Alphabet’s Google unit will continue to deploy Intel’s Xeon processors that support a broad \u200crange of workloads such \u2060as inference and general-purpose computing. The company will also use Intel’s latest Xeon 6 chips.<\/p>\n
Intel and Google will also \u2060expand the co-development of custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs), which can handle tasks traditionally managed by the CPU, enabling more efficient computing.<\/p>\n
“Scaling AI requires more than \u200baccelerators – it \u200brequires balanced systems. CPUs and IPUs \u200bare central to delivering the \u200cperformance, efficiency and flexibility modern AI workloads demand,” said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.<\/p>\n
Surging demand for agentic AI systems – which perform complex, multi-step operations beyond simple chatbot functionality – has boosted the requirement for significantly more CPU processing power.<\/p>\n
The surge in demand for CPUs could help Intel to strengthen \u200cits balance sheet and acquire new customers \u200bafter the chip manufacturer lost market share \u200bto rivals during the early \u200byears of the AI boom.<\/p>\n