Zhitong Finance App learned that GF Securities said that Google's (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US) TPU v9 chip faced slight delays due to embedded multi-chip interconnect bridge (EMIB) substrate yield issues. This may adversely affect MediaTek in the short term, and in the medium to long term, Maywell Technology (MRVL.US) is still in an advantageous position in Google's ASIC supply chain.
Jeff Pu, an analyst at GF Securities, said in an investor report released on Tuesday: “Based on our supply chain research, we believe that the progress of Google's Humufish Core A design plan has been delayed for about 3 weeks. This is likely due to the redesign, which also requires modifications to MediaTek's Core B and I/O. Although the sample target is still set for November, we now anticipate that production will be delayed until January 2027, mass production will be delayed to the second quarter of 2027, and shipping may be delayed until the first quarter of 2028... However, we believe the supply chain has found the root cause of EMIB substrate yield, which is expected to increase the yield again from the current 45-50%.”
GF Securities also emphasized that Google TPU has strong demand for internal use and external customers, including Anthropic. The agency notes that this may be one of the factors that led to Gemini 4 being released later than expected.
Pu said that the recently released Gemini 4 may be pre-trained on a cluster of about 200,000 TPU v7 chips, and excels in coding, reasoning, enterprise applications, network security, and recursive self-improvement. But Google seems to be lagging behind, as a large portion of its TPU v7 was distributed to external customers, particularly in the first half of 2026. Although Google increased internal TPU allocation in the second half of 2026, competition for computing power resources is still fierce; however, the increase in TPU v7 internal allocation may lay a better foundation for the next Gemini model.