This week, Google hinted that it’s ready to make AI chips a prizefight, edging into a lane Nvidia has kept nearly airtight. The two stocks jolted. Analysts pounced on the headline. Whispers spread. But Wedbush analyst Dan Ives isn’t rattled — he cast Nvidia as the “indisputable Rocky Balboa champion” of the AI boom in a note Wednesday morning.
“There is one company in the world that is the foundation for the AI Revolution and that is Nvidia,” Ives wrote, still calling CEO Jensen Huang “the Godfather of AI” with “the best perch and vantage point” on enterprise demand. In Ives’ telling, Nvidia is the company taking the punches and still setting the pace. “The AI Revolution starts and end[s] with Nvidia today,” he wrote, “and that is not changing anytime soon on the chip front.”
Still, Google doesn’t seem inclined to go down without a fight. According to a recent report from The Information, Meta is in discussions to use Google’s TPUs not just in Google Cloud — where TPUs have lived for years — but inside Meta’s data centers starting in 2027, with earlier rented compute also on the table.
That’s a bigger shift than it sounds. For years, Google has kept TPUs tucked inside its ecosystem, a kind of proprietary advantage it rarely tried to commercialize. Opening them up for deployment on someone else’s infrastructure makes it look like Google is behaving like a chip supplier, not just a cloud vendor.
Google parent Alphabet’s stock perked up on the news. Nvidia’s slipped. Chip stocks tied to the AI buildout followed the move because no one wants to be late if the pecking order changes. For a moment, traders tried on the idea that Google might finally be a real contender in the most expensive hardware race on earth. But while Google’s move may be bold, Ives wants to remind everyone that Nvidia — his “tech and AI Rock of Gibraltar” — still runs the ring.
Demand for Nvidia’s Blackwell chips remains “off the charts,” Ives wrote, the kind of supply-constrained bonanza investors haven’t really seen in modern hardware. Every dollar spent on Nvidia’s stack, Wedbush estimates, produces an $8 to $10 multiplier across the tech ecosystem — a figure that practically explains the Street’s reflex to overreact to even modest competitive tremors. And Big Tech’s capex plans don’t exactly dilute the thesis: Wedbush expects $550–$600 billion in spending in 2026, up from about $380 billion this year, a runway generous enough for every would-be challenger to bulk up without denting the leader.
In Ives’ world, Google’s TPU push — and even AMD’s gains and Broadcom’s design wins — looks less like a threat to Nvidia and more like the natural spread of a boom. The analyst even dusted off his favorite time-stamp, calling this a “1996 Moment… and NOT a 1999 Tech Bubble Moment.”
Ives’ conviction lands in a moment when the chip world has been absorbing every twitch of the market like it’s a referendum on the entire AI boom. Nvidia-related anxiety isn’t happening in a vacuum. The past few weeks have produced a steady drip of chip-world anxiety: questions about Nvidia’s China pipeline and the familiar chorus of “AI bubble” warnings despite blockbuster earnings. Add in Michael Burry’s recent put position on Nvidia, and you get a market that’s just a little bit primed to overinterpret any sign of competition.
Opening TPUs up for deployment in other companies’ facilities is the most aggressive version of Google’s chip strategy so far, and Meta doesn’t kick the tires on hardware it thinks has no shot of scaling. If Meta signs on in any meaningful way, it gets leverage on price and supply; Google gets a marquee customer; and Nvidia loses the comfort of being the biggest logo in the conversation.
Google’s latest TPU — the v7 “Ironwood” — delivers peak compute of roughly 4,614 TFLOPS and 192 GB HBM3e memory, with memory bandwidth in the ballpark of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips. Selling TPUs into customer facilities is a real strategic shift, and Meta evaluating them is the clearest sign yet that hyperscalers want more control, more supply, and more bargaining power. Google is turning up the heat because it can.
Call this a warning shot rather than a knockout. Yes, Google has entered the ring, but Ives says Nvidia is still the fighter everyone measures themselves against — the one still dictating the pace, the one the Street keeps betting on, the one he insists is nowhere near its late-round fatigue. Even a rumor of competition can shake billions of dollars loose. Competitors can watch the tape, but the champ, at least for now, is still the champ.
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