Amin Vahdat

Amin Vahdat is Google's Fellow and Chief Technologist for AI Infrastructure, with responsibility for custom silicon, data centers, networks, supply chain and operations. His leadership of the tensor processing unit program puts his name in the Nvidia succession conversation: Google's TPUs compete with Nvidia's AI chips. He has been named as a possible successor to Jensen Huang in a speculative candidate rundown.

Vahdat joined Google in 2010 after holding academic posts at Duke University and the University of California, San Diego. He earned a bachelor's degree at UC Berkeley in 1992 and a doctorate in computer science there in 1998. At Duke, he and a colleague released ModelNet in 2003, a software model of the internet for testing programs. At UC San Diego, he held the SAIC chair and directed the university's center for networked systems.

At Google, he was Technical Lead and Vice President of the Networking organization until 2019, and later Vice President and General Manager for compute, storage and network hardware and software infrastructure. By August 2023, he led the Machine Learning, Systems, and Cloud AI team and systems research. He unveiled the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU in April 2025. He has also said he oversaw development of Axion, Google's first custom Arm-based general-purpose data center CPU. His December 2025 appointment made him a direct report to CEO Sundar Pichai.

The stated gap in his candidacy is experience running a public company with Nvidia's scale, commercial complexity and investor scrutiny. Google does not sell its chips directly, and Vahdat has himself distinguished building a hardware company from building a cloud company. His place on the candidate list remains speculation. There is no reported board interest or contact, and no recorded statement from Vahdat or Google on the Nvidia job.