Google Cloud Seeks to Maintain Fair Pricing Amid Global Chip Shortage

Jakarta (ANTARA) - Google Cloud Indonesia Country Director Karim Siregar said the company is striving to set service prices at an appropriate level amid the global chip shortage and rising prices.

“If we look at this comprehensively, the impact extends to all hyperscalers, so it is certainly not only Google. As for us, we will try our best to ensure prices remain at the appropriate level,” he said at a media briefing in Jakarta on Wednesday.

According to him, global computing providers’ capacity for the next one to two years has already been fully booked, so prices can be maintained.

However, Karim did not rule out the possibility of Google Cloud raising its service prices should chip prices continue to soar.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud Asia Pacific Vice President of Customer Engineering Moe Abdula said the global technology industry is currently facing rising demand for artificial intelligence accelerators such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).

Google Cloud is working to meet AI accelerator demand through partnerships as well as its own in-house development amid shortages of supporting components.

“We provide the TPUs we developed ourselves to our customers and we also offer them GPUs. We are a strong partner of NVIDIA and we provide them (GPUs). So there are no concerns or issues at present in working to meet that demand,” said Moe.

According to him, TPU development originated from Google’s need to provide AI services requiring far greater computing capacity than conventional computing systems.

“What I can say is that at Google, we created the TPU a long time ago, when we realised that AI systems needed something different,” he said.

In addition, Moe said GPUs are still needed in a number of regions because not all data centres are designed to support TPUs.

Therefore, Google maintains its close partnership with NVIDIA as its GPU supplier.