Intel and Google have announced a multi-year collaboration agreement that will see Google will continue to deploy Intel Xeon-based platforms for its next generation of AI and cloud infrastructure.

These platforms will use Intel’s upcoming Xeon CPUs and custom infrastructure processing units (IPUs) co-designed by Intel and Google.  In return, Google will continue co-development of the IPUs (referred to as SmartNICs by other firms) which are designed to offload networking, storage, and security functions from the CPUs.

Google Cloud already deploys Intel processors across its workload-optimized instances, including the latest Intel Xeon 6 processors powering C4 and N4 instances. These platforms support a range of workloads, from large-scale AI training coordination to latency-sensitive inference and general-purpose computing.

“Scaling AI requires more than accelerators – it requires balanced systems. CPUs and IPUs are central to delivering the performance, efficiency and flexibility modern AI workloads demand,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO  of Intel in a statement.

Google does offer custom Armv9-based Axion processors as an alternative to x86 based instances and are known for power efficiency and lower costs. But there are some instances that simply require x86, such as optimized workloads or require maximum single threaded performance where the Intel Xeon CPUs excel.

Separately, Intel has joined an alliance led by AI chatbot developer Anthropic called Project Glasswing. The alliance brings together more than 45 organizations across a number of sectors, including tech, finance, and cybersecurity sectors with the goal of using powerful next-generation AI models to identify and fix critical software vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.

The project is built on Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased frontier AI model developed by Anthropic that has already shown its value by finding what Anthropic calls “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser.”