Google enter the market for chip. The Mountain View colossus will develop central processors at home mainly intended for two product categories, notebooks and tablets, but there is also talk of chips intended for Pixel smartphones and other devices. In this way, the Californian giant is adapting to the global trend that sees the main technology groups committed to transforming themselves into autonomous chip producers, in order to make up for the semiconductor availability crisis which has been flagellating various production sectors for months.
The news was released by the newspaper Nikkei Asia, which cites three sources who agree that Google is developing CPUs for devices running the proprietary Chrome operating system. The timing of the operation would, in any case, be quite long, given that the chip production capacity should become fully operational no earlier than 2023.
The new Google processors will be based on chip models from Arm, a British company controlled by Japanese Softbank.
To date, most chips in the world are produced in four countries: Taiwan, South Korea, the US and Japan. The problem arose with the start of the pandemic crisis, which caused the demand for semiconductors to suddenly increase. The surge has led to a production bottleneck that has forced many large companies – from automotive to consumer electronics – to interrupt or reshape production.
These challenges have shown that outsourcing chip manufacturing poses a serious risk to security and supply chains.
As a result, several tech giants (from Amazon to Facebook, from Microsoft to Tesla, via Baidu and Alibaba) have started producing chips in house. The fastest was Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, which has already developed semiconductors for iPhones and has announced that it will soon replace those used in Mac computers.
