EETimes has an article quoting John Doerr that Google has chip designers.
Google Ramps Up Chip Design
SAN FRANCISCO — Google appears to be ramping up a broad and deep effort in developing its own chips. Just what it is designing is still unclear.
At a panel at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference(ISSCC), veteran venture capitalist John Doerr said, "at some point in time Facebook will work on proprietary silicon, I know for a fact Google is."
The same day, another veteran chip designer at ISSCC told EE Times he knows at least two or three circuit designers Google has hired over the last year or so.
A key engineer behind the Hewlett-Packard Moonshoot server moved to Google six months ago. Partha Ranganathan "is currently at Google designing their next-generation systems," according tohis website. He worked at HP on systems that can accommodate a wide range of Xeon, Atom, and ARM processors.
Would Google be designing their own server chips? The media is all excited Google would develop ARM servers. How much better can Google make a two proc server run?
What makes way more sense is Google designing silicon for a high performance fabric that works across 100s/1000s of servers or maybe even 10,000/100,000 servers. If you look at Partha’s resume you can see he has the background for disaggregation systems and systems that scale. Like a super computer system.