Google Unveils Two New AI Chips, Will Invest $750 Million in Agentic AI Adoption

By Adriano Marchese

Google unveiled its latest custom chips and set up a new $750 million agentic AI partner fund to accelerate the adoption of agentic artificial intelligence.

The TPU 8t and TPU 8i, Google's new eighth-generation chips that will be available later this year, were co-designed in partnership with Google DeepMind, Google-parent Alphabet's AI research lab, to meet more demanding workloads of AI agents as well as to adapt to evolving model designs at a large scale.

Google said the chips can take on greater workloads at much faster speeds and at nearly a lower cost of its previous chip generation.

"[The chips] are designed to handle the intricate, collaborative, iterative work of many specialized agents, often "swarming" together in complex flows to deliver solutions and insights for the most challenging tasks, " Google said Wednesday.

The announcement comes as part of the Google Cloud Next 2026 conference, where the company rolled out a slate of agentic AI partnerships with SAP, Accenture, Oracle and Merck.

"Several years ago, we anticipated rising demand for inference from customers as frontier AI models are deployed in production and at scale," Amin Vahdat, Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post Wednesday. "And with the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving."

Separately, Google signed a $1 billion deal with Merck to deploy an agentic platform across Merck's research & development, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions.

"Merck's collaboration with Google Cloud represents the next phase of our AI journey, extending our longstanding use of advanced technologies into an intelligent agentic ecosystem that will work alongside our teams, as we enter one of the most significant launch periods in our company's history," said Dave Williams, chief information and digital officer at Merck.

Earlier this month, Anthropic said it was expanding its use of Google Cloud's TPU chips as it aims to grow its computing resources to train the next generations of its AI model Claude. Under the agreement, Anthropic will have access to up to 1 million TPU chips, as well as additional Google Cloud services.

Google also expanded its long-running partnerships Oracle, SAP and Accenture to scale agentic AI adoption.

Google said the $750 million fund is to help its 120,000-member partner ecosystem adopt and build out agentic AI. The fund aims to support early prototyping to full agent development allowing consulting firms, systems integrators and software partners to integrate AI tools into existing software and workflows.

Write to Adriano Marchese at adriano.marchese@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 22, 2026 09:26 ET (13:26 GMT)