SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 -- Google has spent years insisting it would never be caught short on computing power. It built its own custom chips, the Tensor Processing Units, specifically to sidestep dependence on Nvidia's GPUs. It has committed to more than $180 billion in capital expenditure this year. By some estimates, it is the world's largest single owner of AI compute. And yet, on June 5, the company agreed to pay a rocket builder nearly $1 billion a month for GPUs it apparently cannot get anywhere else fast enough.

The deal, disclosed in a regulatory filing tied to SpaceX's historic initial public offering, commits Google to pay $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to approximately 110,000 Nvidia GPUs, ...