Google touts Titan chip to market cloud services

Alphabet Inc’s Google this week will disclose technical details of its new Titan computer chip, an elaborate security feature for its cloud computing network that the company hopes will enable it to steal a march on Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp.

Titan is the size of a tiny stud earring that Google has installed in each of the many thousands of computer servers and network cards that populate its massive data centres that power Google’s cloud services.

Google is hoping Titan will help it carve out a bigger piece of the worldwide cloud computing market, which is forecast by Gartner to be worth nearly US$50 billion.

A Google spokeswoman said the company plans to disclose Titan’s technical details in a blog post on Thursday.

Titan scans hardware to ensure it has not been tampered with, Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing for Google Cloud Platform, said in a recent interview. If anything has been changed, Titan chip will prevent the machine from booting.

Data centre operators are concerned that cyber criminals or nation-state hackers could compromise their servers, which are mostly made by Asian hardware companies, before they even reach the United States.

“It allows us to maintain a level of understanding in our supply chain that we otherwise wouldn’t have,” Mueller said.

Neither Amazon.com nor Microsoft — which hold 41 per cent and 13 per cent of cloud market share, respectively, according to Synergy Research Group — have said if they have similar features.

In response to inquiries from Reuters, representatives of both companies pointed to the various ways they use encryption and other measures to secure their data centres.

Google holds just 7 per cent of the worldwide cloud market. Titan is part of a strategy Google hopes will differentiate its services and attract enterprise customers from sectors with complex compliance regulations, such as those in financial services and the medical field. Google announced Titan in March.

Google has struggled to compete with Amazon Web Services, which has more features, and Microsoft, which has long-standing relationships with enterprises, said Lydia Leong, an analyst for Gartner.