Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi forecast a meaningful revenue ramp in TPU sales in 2027, according to a report on Google’s third-quarter earnings call published October 28. Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian also said TPU sales had made a meaningful contribution to Q3 financials, the report said.
The remarks came one day after Oracle and Google announced a plan to make Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) during calendar year 2027. The companies said capacity would ramp over multiple years.
OCI is the planned route to cloud access
Under the October 27 announcement, Oracle is to provide the power, cooling and data-center networking for Google’s TPUs on OCI. Oracle and Google described OCI as the first hyperscale cloud outside Google to offer the accelerators.
That means the announcement concerns access to cloud computing capacity, not a consumer PC chip release. For customers, OCI is the cloud platform where the planned service would be accessed; Oracle supplies the supporting data-center infrastructure.
TPU 8t is for training; TPU 8i is for inference
The companies assigned different roles to the two announced eighth-generation models:
| Model | Announced role |
| TPU 8t | Training |
| TPU 8i | Inference |
Training is the process of teaching a model from data; inference is using a trained model to generate results. The announced workload scope includes training and post-training large models, including dense and mixture-of-experts models. For inference, Oracle and Google named production applications involving reasoning, AI agents and long-context tasks.
Google said TPU 8t delivers nearly three times the compute performance per pod of the previous generation. The figure is Google’s stated comparison. The announcement also presents TPU 8t and TPU 8i as options for different stages and types of AI work, rather than as a single-purpose accelerator.
The revenue outlook and a separate OpenAI report
Ashkenazi’s forecast concerns TPU sales revenue in 2027; Kurian’s comment concerns TPU sales’ contribution to Q3 financials. Neither statement supplies a revenue figure. They are separate from the October 27 OCI announcement, which describes planned cloud access and its infrastructure arrangement.
Separately, Business Insider relayed The Information’s report that OpenAI plans to buy Google TPUs. That reported plan concerns OpenAI’s purchase intentions, not the Oracle-OCI arrangement.
