Google seen expanding its chip design efforts

Years ago, Apple began its journey to take more control over its hardware by designing more and more chips itself. Now analysts see Google following in Apple's footsteps as the search giant is beefing up its efforts to rely more on custom-design chips.

Bloomberg speculates the deal with HTC could be the first step to help set up Google to wade deeper into special-purpose chips:

The deal will help Google design more of its own consumer hardware and could set it up to wade deeper into special-purpose chips -- like Apple. Google’s most recent Pixel model came with a new image processor to improve the device’s camera. More of this "custom silicon" will come in the future, Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh said in an interview.

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Still, by designing more silicon itself, Google could cut business for other suppliers. Apple released its first system-on-a-chip in 2010, and has added special chips to store fingerprint and payment data, track motion, crunch graphics and run AI algorithms on mobile devices.

This wouldn't be the first time Google creates custom chips. In recent years, the search giant created TPUs, which are used to speed up machine learning jobs in the company's datacenters.