Amin Vahdat, VP of Machine Learning, Systems and Cloud AI at Google, holds up TPU Version 4 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on July 23, 2024.
Google 's AI infrastructure boss told employees that the company has to double its compute capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services.
At an all-hands meeting on Nov. 6, Amin Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, gave a presentation, viewed by CNBC, titled "AI Infrastructure," which included a slide on "AI compute demand." The slide said, "Now we must double every 6 months.... the next 1000x in 4-5 years."
"The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race," Vahdat said at the meeting, where Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Anat Ashkenazi also took questions from employees.
The presentation was delivered a week after Alphabet reported better-than-expected third-quarter results and raised its capital expenditures forecast for the second time this year, to a range of $91 billion to $93 billion, followed by a "significant increase" in 2026. Hyperscaler peers Microsoft , Amazon and Meta also boosted their capex guidance, and the four companies now expect to collectively spend more than $380 billion this year.
Google's "job is of course to build this infrastructure but it's not to outspend the competition, necessarily," Vahdat said. "We're going to spend a lot," he said, adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far "more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what's available anywhere else."
In addition to infrastructure buildouts, Vahdat said Google bolsters capacity with more efficient models and through its custom silicon. Last week, Google announced the public launch of its seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit called Ironwood, which the company says is nearly 30 times more power efficient than its first Cloud TPU from 2018.
Vahdat said the company has a big advantage with DeepMind, which has research on what AI models can look like in future years.
Google needs to "be able to deliver 1,000 times more capability, compute, storage networking for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level," Vahdat said. "It won't be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we're going to get there."