Google is expanding its efforts to design its own smartphone and data center chips by building a new team of engineers dedicated to the project in Bengaluru, an up-and-coming semiconductor site in the capital of the south Indian state of Karnataka, according to a report from Reuters. The new team, which Reuters says includes at least 16 engineers and four recruiters and will likely continue to increase in headcount, is the latest sign that the tech industry’s biggest players are trying to rid themselves of reliance on the traditional chip business. Among the new hires are engineers from Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, Reuters reports.

For close to a decade, Apple and Google have been steadily bringing more chip design in-house, starting with Apple’s A4 processor for the iPhone and, in recent years, including dedicated chips for graphics and on-device image and artificial intelligence processing. (Google also designs its own AI training and inference chips for data centers, called Tensor Processing Units.) Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft have all followed suit in recent years, mostly for AI chips.

Yet regardless, the Big Five’s push to establish independence from big chipmakers, namely Intel and Qualcomm, has seriously threatened the businesses of some of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most venerated companies. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its new chip team.

The tech industry’s biggest companies have been bringing chip design in-house

Not helping the chipmakers is Apple’s fast-deteriorating relationship with Qualcomm over the use of the latter’s modem chips in the iPhone, now the source of a convoluted series of lawsuits. Apple initially sued Qualcomm in early 2017 for alleged anti-competitive practices related to how much money it was charing the iPhone maker for its modems, a critical component for accessing the internet on a smartphone.

Qualcomm countersued, leading to an aggressive escalation between the two companies that’s resulted in Apple ditching Qualcomm to exclusively use Intel modems in last year’s iPhones, an attempted ban on US sales of certain iPhones, and Apple’s reported plans to ditch the chipmakers entirely and develop its own modems in-house. Now, despite using Intel modems going forward and likely to power the first 5G-capable iPhones next year, it looks like Apple may even eventually stopping using Intel to supply components like the processors for Mac computers, a new version of which Apple is said to be developing internally as well.

All that said, it’s looking like the biggest device and software makers in the industry are only going to continue pushing away the chip suppliers. For Google, which has expanded its device lineup in recent years to include smart speakers and all manner of other AI-controlled gadgets, custom chip design is paramount to ensure it can tightly integrate hardware and software features, as Apple does with the iPhone and its growing family of accessories. According to Reuters, Google currently has only 13 open job listings in Bengaluru, but if the company’s chip efforts go well and its team expands into the hundreds, Google may relieve itself of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line in the future.