Hirings (and to a lesser extent, firings) are often used as a forward-looking indicator of a company’s future plans – and we love to speculate on Google’s plans more than practically any other. Today, 9to5google reports that Google’s making a lot of hires in Bengaluru, India – known to be a design hub for chip manufacturing.
Google’s “gChips” team is said to have acquired nearly 20 new employees in recent months, hailing from companies like Qualcomm and Broadcom, but also Intel and Nvidia. 9to5Google says the team is intended to grow fourfold to 80 employees by the end of the year.
Before we start dreaming of Pixel 4 running a custom processor designed and built in-house, it’s worth remembering that Google – like Apple, Microsoft, and even Facebook – is well known to have an interest in developing its own processor hardware outside of the mobile space. These companies all have massive investments in infrastructure powering their servers and services and they want to keep their infrastructure clear of dependency on specific vendors, hence the appeal of bringing things in-house.
This team might well be dedicated to optimising power consumption in Google’s data centres rather than putting cool chips in consumer hardware, although the company’s increasing efforts in the consumer and IoT hardware space in the last few years might see some Google-built chips in your home.
