According to a Nikkei Asia report, Google has informed its suppliers that from 2027 onward, no Pixel phone, watch or set of earbuds will be assembled in China. Vietnam and India pick up the work instead.
This is a clean break rather than a hedge. The company has spent years quietly ramping up capacity in both countries, yet the bulk of its manufacturing still takes place in China today.
The Pixel 11 was the test run
Back in January, Nikkei Asia reported that Google would develop and manufacture the Pixel 11 in Vietnam. That involved far more than trucking a few crates of parts across a border.
Google had to purchase testing equipment and tooling machines, then verify and fine-tune the entire production process so its newest handsets could be built there from scratch. Phones are the difficult piece: earbuds and smartwatches are considerably simpler to assemble, so clearing the highest bar first is reportedly what convinced Google it could shift everything else as well.
Why Google can do this and Apple can’t
One source told the publication that walking away from China is easier for Google than it would be for a company like Apple, and the reasoning is blunt: Google doesn’t officially sell Pixel devices in China at all. There’s no domestic market to antagonize.
Its phone userbase there is still small. And rather than starting cold, Google can plug into the smartphone supply chain that Samsung already built out in Vietnam.
That last detail matters more than the geopolitics. Standing up a phone line in a country with no existing supplier base is a multi-year problem. Standing one up next door to Samsung’s is a logistics problem.
Twelve million units, and Google wants more
Suppliers have also apparently been told that Google plans to raise Pixel shipments by 8 to 10 percent this year, up from 12 million units in 2025.
For context on how modest that is: 12 million units is a rounding error next to what the top Android makers move annually. Google isn’t chasing volume for its own sake. The company is hoping the phones pull more people into using Gemini's AI capabilities, which makes the Pixel less a profit center than a distribution channel.
The memory chip workaround
Here’s the shrewdest part of the report. Memory component costs are rising, and Google has reportedly been bundling its orders for phone memory chips together with the chip orders for its cloud computing business.
Google’s cloud arm buys memory at a scale its phone division never will. Folding the Pixel’s comparatively tiny order into that one gives Google leverage that a standalone phone maker shipping 12 million units a year simply doesn’t have. It’s the kind of advantage you only get when your phone business is a side project of a much larger company.
None of this is official. Google hasn’t confirmed the 2027 timeline, and supply chain plans reported two years out have a way of slipping. But if you’re wondering whether the Pixel 11 launching from Vietnam was a one-off experiment, the answer appears to be no. It was the pilot.