Google AI infrastructure chief Amin Vahdat says it chose two chips instead of one: 8i for inference, 8t for training. "The question that we were facing, let's say, two years ago or a little bit more was, in 2026, should we have two chips or one?" "We could have one chip that could do inference and training simultaneously and do both quite well, or we could have two chips, one that was further specialized for inference and the second one that was further specialized for training." "This analysis and this work led to the release of two chips this year, 8i for inference, 8t for training." "It wasn't the case necessarily a couple years ago, but by 26 we saw inference and serving really taking off." "If we projected inference to be 2 percent or 5 percent of the market, even if that specialized chip is, let's say, 2x faster, it might not make sense because you'd actually go for the one general purpose chip that's not fully optimized, but that's okay because you now have the uniformity, etc." - Amin Vahdat, Google chief technologist for AI infrastructure, with Sonya Huang on Sequoia Capital's podcast (uploaded October 6).