With its core business under threat, Google has spent the past two years pouring resources into building its own AI chips. In charge of those efforts is Vahdat, one of Business Insider's 2024 AI Power List picks. Vahdat has been at the company for more than a decade and is today setting the direction for Google's silicon strategy. That also means working closely with Google DeepMind to take its breakthrough models and integrate them throughout Google's products, whether YouTube's creator tools or Google's search ads. Vahdat says he likes to think the arrival of Google's tensor processing units led to the Transformer AI model breakthrough, which set the stage for large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini. "The last eight years or so has been breaking all the rules," Vahdat said. "Everything was replaced by an essentially custom-built supercomputer." This year Google announced Axion, a custom Arm-based CPU for data centers that competes directly with Amazon and Microsoft. Its capabilities, alongside the TPUs, could give Google a real edge in the chip wars. "Being able to bring these elements together in the future could be pretty exciting," he says.
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