Google DeepMind is hiring a team lead to head AI chip design research engineering efforts.

The company claims that its AlphaChip system has already been used in the development of the past five generations of Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) as well as Axion Arm-based CPUs.

The job listing also notes that Google "Gemini has been adopted by the hardware team in multiple workstreams accelerating the chip design process."

Research initially began at Google Brain (which was merged into DeepMind in 2023), with the project co-led by Anna Goldie.

Goldie was the lead co-author (alongside Azalia Mirhoseini) of a 2020 AlphaChip research paper, which said "dramatically shortening the chip design cycle would allow hardware to better adapt to the rapidly advancing field of AI. We believe that it is AI itself that will provide the means to shorten the chip design cycle, creating a symbiotic relationship between hardware and AI with each fueling advances in the other."

The group claimed that AlphaChip was able to save thousands of hours of human effort for each new generation of Google TPU AI accelerator, with the work open-sourced in 2022.

However, in 2023, two papers cast doubt on the success of the effort - one from Chang et al., and one from Igor Markov. Chang's paper said that they were unable to reproduce Google's methods, while Markov, a scientist at competitor Synopsys, published a meta-analysis that called the approach a 'false dawn.'

Nature investigated the claims, with Google in 2024 noting that it "found entirely in our favor." AlphaChip has since expanded, with MediaTek announcing it will use the AI as part of its chip development.

However, the team has also faced high-profile departures. Both Goldie and Mirhoseini left in September 2025 to found Ricursive Intelligence, an AI chip development company. Other AlphaChip staffers, including Ebrahim Songhori, Hao Chen, and Jiwoo Pak, came with them. This week, the firm raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation.

Another key departure was that of Richard Ho. One of the original paper's authors, he left in 2022 for photonic chip company Lightmatter. He later joined OpenAI as head of hardware, where he works with Broadcom on the company's custom AI chips.

Another author, Young-Joon Lee, left for Apple in 2024 - following AlphaChip colleague Emre Tuncer, who left for Apple in 2022. Will Hang left in 2019 to found a stealth startup.

Others remain, and the company has regularly hired since, including bringing over neuromorphic computing researcher Maxence Ernoult from Rain AI last year. Google DeepMind has multiple job listings for hardware engineers, part of a team conducting research and engineering towards automatically designing hardware/chips using AI.

The team lead role, meanwhile, adds that the group will be expected to "develop ML breakthroughs that will have a big impact for Google and for the whole chip design industry," as well as "use LLMs and transformer models to accelerate chip design," and "solve some of the most complex tasks in Chip Design (RTL generation, RTL verification, Logic Synthesis, Physical Design, PPA prediction)."