Intel and Google have expanded their long-running collaboration with a new multi-year agreement focused on cloud and AI infrastructure. Under the deal, Google will continue using Intel Xeon-based systems in future generations of its infrastructure, including environments built for AI, inference, and general-purpose workloads.

The partnership also covers joint work on custom infrastructure processing units, or IPUs, which offload networking, storage, and security tasks from the main CPU. Google Cloud already uses Intel chips in workload-optimized instances, including C4 and N4 systems powered by the latest Xeon 6 processors.

Why Intel Still Matters

Even though Google offers its own Arm-based Axion processors, Intel remains important for workloads that need x86 compatibility or strong single-thread performance. That makes Xeon a practical choice for certain enterprise and cloud applications that are not easily moved to Arm.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the deal reflects the need for “balanced systems,” not just accelerators. In Intel’s view, CPUs and IPUs remain central to delivering the efficiency, flexibility, and performance required by modern AI deployments.

Beyond CPUs

The agreement is not limited to processors. Intel and Google will keep co-developing IPUs, also known by some vendors as SmartNICs, to improve how infrastructure tasks are handled at scale.

In practical terms, that means more efficient data centers, better workload utilization, and less pressure on CPUs to handle everything themselves. For large cloud operators like Google, that can translate into lower overhead and more predictable performance across mixed workloads.

Anthropic Project Glasswing

Separately, Intel has also joined Project Glasswing, an AI security alliance led by Anthropic. The group brings together more than 45 organizations across technology, finance, and cybersecurity to use advanced AI models to find and fix software vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.

The project is built around Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview model, which the company says has already uncovered thousands of severe vulnerabilities across major operating systems and browsers. Anthropic says the system has found bugs in every major operating system and browser during internal testing.