There was some chatter that large AI infrastructure investments are unsustainable and could possibly be getting forward of demand, however Google has indicated that may not be the case.
In an evaluation of the present AI infrastructure panorama, Amin Vahdat, a senior government overseeing Google’s AI infrastructure, revealed in October 2025 that the corporate’s decade-old tensor processing items are operating at full capability—an indicator of the insatiable demand for AI compute sources. Vahdat’s feedback paint an image of an trade the place provide constraints, not demand weak point, stay the defining problem.
“We’re early within the cycle, what I’d say, definitely relative to the demand that we’re seeing from our inner customers,” Vahdat defined. “We’ve been constructing TPUs for 10 years, so we have now now seven generations in manufacturing for inner and exterior use. Our seven and eight-year-old TPUs have 100% utilization.”
The implications of this assertion are vital. Within the expertise sector, {hardware} sometimes depreciates quickly, with newer generations rendering older gear out of date. But Google’s expertise tells a distinct story. “That simply exhibits what the demand is,” Vahdat continued. “Everybody would in fact want to be on the newest technology, however no matter they will get.”
Maybe most revealing was Vahdat’s evaluation of the tasks being delayed attributable to capability constraints. “This tells me that the demand is large, but additionally who we’re turning away and the use circumstances that we’re turning away—it’s not like, ‘oh yeah, that’s type of cool.’ It’s, ‘oh my gosh, we’re truly not going to take a position on this and there’s no choice as a result of that’s the place we’re on the listing.’”
Vahdat’s feedback counsel that Google is having to make tough decisions about which high-priority AI tasks obtain compute sources, with doubtlessly transformative purposes being shelved merely attributable to infrastructure availability. This isn’t a narrative of marginal demand for experimental options—it’s mission-critical work being constrained by {hardware} availability.
The broader context helps Vahdat’s evaluation. Google’s TPU structure has develop into more and more central to the AI trade’s operations. The corporate educated its benchmark-topping Gemini 3 Professional mannequin solely on TPUs, demonstrating the chips’ functionality for frontier AI improvement. Extra considerably, Anthropic not too long ago signed a take care of Google to entry 1 million TPUs for its personal AI improvement work, representing a large exterior validation of each the demand for specialised AI {hardware} and Google’s place as a serious infrastructure supplier.
These developments counsel that reasonably than approaching a plateau, AI infrastructure funding might certainly be in its early innings. If even legacy {hardware} from practically a decade in the past instructions full utilization, the trade seems removed from the purpose of oversupply that some analysts have warned about. For firms betting billions on AI infrastructure buildouts, Vahdat’s perspective gives reassurance that demand stays strong—and maybe extra importantly, that the use circumstances being constrained by present capability symbolize genuinely priceless purposes reasonably than speculative experimentation.
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