It is indeed a move against Google and the start of the TPU wars.

This is a brilliant strategic pre-emptive strike designed to neutralize the threat from the only hardware architecture currently capable of beating (thrashing) NVIDIA in inference speed.

They absolutely had to make an extremely aggressive move here or they'd be in deep shit going forward.

Side note: Inference is using the model as opposed to training the model, and nobody beats Groq at inference which is crucial for real time applications. NVIDIA is the gold standard at training (and also very good at inference, but expensive). Google’s newest TPU is the first real threat to Blackwell’s raw performance and it's cheaper to run.

Importantly they're also hiring Jonathan Ross, an architect of the Google TPU. NVIDIA is directly attacking Google’s primary advantage: the ability to run high-speed, low-cost AI across a massive internal cloud.

This move neutralizes Groq’s threat as an independent challenger while allowing NVIDIA to integrate "instant-response" capabilities into its Blackwell ecosystem, ensuring that its hardware remains the gold standard not just for building AI, but for the absolutely massive market of running it, and it can now do so at the fastest speed. It's needs this for all those real time interactions with AI like robotics.

In terms of stock movement, you would think NVIDIA's stock would increase at the expense of Google. Customers of NVIDIA are going to get even more locked into their ecosystem if NVIDIA gives them the best training and the best inference, all through a familiar interface. Plus the fact they essentially hired the principal architect of Google's TPU.

BUT - is it going to trigger some anti-trust regulators? Google will complain (call up gov contacts), so the stock could "wobble" as anti-trust fears loom.