A three-week slip in a design revision at the front of a chip programme can cost a quarter of shipments at the back. That arithmetic now faces Google’s next custom accelerator.
Commercial Times, citing institutional investors, reported that revisions to Google’s TPU v9 Core A design, codenamed Humufish, pushed development back by about three weeks. That shifts the initial tape-out to January 2027 from late 2026, with a production-version tape-out following in the second quarter.
MediaTek handles the Core B and input-output designs. The November sampling target is unchanged, but shipments may now slip into the first quarter of 2028.
Packaging is the second gate
The chip is expected to use Intel’s EMIB-T, an embedded bridge packaging approach. Substrate yields are the constraint, and they determine both how fast volume scales and what each accelerator costs to build. That makes the programme a test of Intel’s packaging business as much as of MediaTek’s design work.
The delay matters beyond one customer. Google has been releasing TPU generations faster to offer cloud customers an alternative to merchant GPUs, and each custom generation requires handoffs among design houses, foundries and packagers that leave little slack.
MediaTek is also trying to widen its ASIC base. Bloomberg reported that ByteDance is close to an agreement to buy its data-centre chips, which would make the TikTok parent its second major custom-silicon customer after Google and a hedge against concentration in one account.
Other Taiwanese ASIC houses are picking up work as the custom accelerator market broadens, though the largest programmes remain concentrated among a few design partners with the headcount to absorb revisions.
A quarter of slippage, alone, is survivable. Repeated slips are how a two-year cadence starts to look like three.
