That was enough to rattle Wall Street, and also Nvidia itself.
It’s not hard to read between the lines. Google’s TPUs might be gaining traction, but Nvidia wants investors, and its customers, to know that it still sees itself as unstoppable.
Brian Kersmanc, a bearish portfolio manager at GQG Partners, had predicted this moment. In an interview with Fortune late last week, he warned that the industry was beginning to recognize Google’s chips as a viable alternative.
“Something I think was very understated in the media, which is fascinating, but Alphabet, Google’s Gemini 3 model, they said that they use their own TPUs to train that model,” Kersmanc said. “So the Nvidia argument is that they’re on all platforms, while arguably the most successful AI company now, which is [Google], didn’t even use GPUs to train their latest model.”
For most of the past decade, Google’s AI chips were treated as a clever in-house tool: fast, efficient, and tightly integrated with Google’s own systems, but not a true threat to Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs, which monopolize more than 90% of the AI accelerator market.
Part of that is architectural. TPUs are ASICs, custom chips optimized for a narrow set of workloads. Nvidia, in its X post, made sure to underline the contrast.
“Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” the company said, positioning its GPUs as the universal option that can train and run any model across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments. Nvidia also pointed to its latest Blackwell architecture, which it insists remains a generation ahead of the field.
The defensive posture wasn’t limited to Google. Behind the scenes, Nvidia has also been quietly fighting another front: a growing feud with Michael Burry, the investor famous for predicting the 2008 housing collapse and a central character in Michael Lewis’s classic The Big Short.
Burry has accused the company of excessive stock-based compensation, inflated depreciation schedules that make data center build-outs appear more profitable, and enabling “circular financing” in the AI startup ecosystem. Nvidia, in its memo, pushed back line by line.
