Google and Pentagon in talks to run custom AI chips inside classified environments — Google pushes for tight controls for TPUs surrounding use for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons

Google is reportedly negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense to deploy Gemini in classified settings, with the talks covering the addition of GPU racks to Google Distributed Cloud and a first-time deployment of Google's tensor processing unit (TPU) inside accredited classified environments, according to a report published today by The Information, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions.

Google Distributed Cloud picked up DoD Impact Level 6 authorization for Secret classified data in May 2025, sitting alongside an existing Top Secret authorization that nominally makes Gemini and Vertex AI available at those classification levels. But relatively little infrastructure exists inside the accredited boundary to run classified workloads at scale, according to The Information's source, and closing that gap is part of the current conversation.

In the short term, that means adding racks of GPUs to Google Distributed Cloud. A parallel workstream covers enabling TPUs, Google's custom AI accelerators, inside classified environments, which hasn’t been done before, according to the same sources. TPUs run the bulk of Gemini training and inference in Google's commercial cloud, making their deployment on the classified side the natural step for any Gemini rollout beyond small-scale pilots.

The proposed contract would let the Pentagon use Gemini for "all lawful purposes," with Google pushing for language prohibiting domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons without appropriate human oversight. Those terms mirror the agreement OpenAI struck with the Pentagon earlier this year, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked the Pentagon to extend to all AI vendors on the same terms.

Those two issues broke the Pentagon's negotiations with Anthropic in February. After Anthropic declined to drop the restrictions, the Pentagon designated the company a supply chain risk and began a six-month phase-out of Claude from government systems, a designation a federal judge has since called "Orwellian" while declining to stay the ruling in one of Anthropic's two ongoing lawsuits.

Google holds roughly 14% of the total cloud market against 28% for AWS and 21% for Microsoft as of late 2025, per Synergy Research Group, and the gap widens on the classified side, where both rivals run substantial workloads, and Google doesn’t. Google Public Sector, the division running the DoD talks, targeted roughly $6 billion in bookings for 2025 through 2027, $2 billion of it from defense, according to an internal strategic plan that The Information reports having seen.

Google lost last year's Army Next Generation Command and Control bid, but in July, it won a DoD AI pilot contract worth up to $200 million alongside Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI. Gemini was the first model added to the Pentagon's unclassified GenAI.mil platform in December, and Google announced a separate deal last month for AI agent tooling on unclassified networks.

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