AI compute and energy
2026-04-26
12 min read
12 sources
The Custom Silicon Insurgency Against Nvidia in 2026
AWS Trainium 2, Google TPU v5p and Trillium, Microsoft Maia, Meta MTIA, and a possible OpenAI ASIC are reshaping where AI compute margin lives, but the binding constraint sits one layer down at HBM and CoWoS-L.
The hyperscalers spent 2024 and 2025 telling investors that custom silicon would relieve their dependence on Nvidia, and 2026 is the year those claims start meeting empirical scrutiny. AWS has stood up Project Rainier for Anthropic at a publicly disclosed scale of more than one million Trainium 2 chips. Google has placed its TPU v5p gener...