The information is tucked away in technical documentation, but it’s significant. To build Gemini 3 Pro, Google did not rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), long considered indispensable. The company confirmed to us that its latest generative AI model, unveiled last week, “was fully trained on our custom TPUs.” Likewise, inference — the process of generating responses — “currently” relies solely on these in-house chips.
Earlier versions of Gemini had already been trained on TPUs. But the detail went largely unnoticed. The reason is simple: at the time, those models were seen as far inferior to their rival GPT systems, developed by OpenAI. That is no longer the case. Not only does Gemini 3 Pro outperform GPT-5.1 on various benchmarks, but user feedback has also been highly positive. The same goes for its image generator, Nano Banana, which was also trained on TPUs.
Internal needs
TPUs — Tensor Processing Units — celebrate their tenth anniversary this year. Originally designed…
