Intel and Google announce multi-year collaboration to advance AI infrastructure

On Thursday, Intel and Google announced a multi-year collaboration to advance AI infrastructure. Under this program, Google will continue to deploy Intel Xeon systems for its AI and cloud infrastructure going forward. Moreover, both companies agreed to work together on the expanded co-development of custom silicon, especially targeted towards AI applications.

According to Intel's announcement, this collaboration is essential for the future of AI infrastructure, as Google and Intel will work together to improve performance and energy efficiency, and to optimize costs for Google's AI and cloud deployments. In simple terms, both tech giants are going to work together to best capitalize on the AI boom.

The outlined program has two major parts: first, Google will continue to use Intel's Xeon processors for its Cloud, AI, inference, and general-purpose workloads. This will include both current Xeon models and future models that will likely be developed with Google's specific needs in mind.

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The second aspect of the deal is a bit more interesting. Intel states that the two companies will co-develop custom ASIC-based infrastructure processing units (IPUs) targeted squarely at AI applications. One can think of these "IPUs" as Intel's response to AI-specific compute products that are making their way into the mainstream, such as Arm's AGI CPU.

From what we gather, these ASIC-based IPUs will work hand in hand with host CPUs and offload certain networking, security, and storage functions to improve efficiency at scale. Regardless, it seems Intel is sticking with x86 in its data centers and has no plans to change instruction sets amid rising competition.

Both Intel and Google expressed confidence in the future of the Xeon platform. It remains to be seen how this partnership affects the AI ecosystem moving forward, and whether it will elicit a response from competitors such as OpenAI, AMD, and Arm. By the looks of it, however, Google seems pretty locked in with Intel for the foreseeable future when it comes to its internal infrastructure.