Google is taking aim at Nvidia and rolling out its most powerful chip yet, as the battle to win AI business continues to heat up.
The seventh-generation Ironwood tensor processing unit (TPU) has been in testing since April and will be generally available in the coming weeks.
Ironwood has been “purpose-built for the most demanding workloads: from large-scale model training and complex reinforcement learning (RL) to high-volume, low-latency AI inference and model serving,” according to a Google blog post.
It also constitutes an upgrade in performance, operating ten times faster than the company’s fifth-generation TPU and four times quicker than its sixth-gen one, Trillium, the company stated.
Of particular note is the design, with each chip connected to another, creating a pod, which allows them to work as a single unit.
With Ironwood TPUs, up to 9,216 chips can be linked in a superpod, and this connectivity — via Google’s proprietary Inter-Chip Interconnect network operating at 9.6 terabits per second — is able to overcome data bottlenecks for even the most demanding models, assisted by access to 1.77 petabytes of shared high-bandwidth memory.
Google’s release is strategically timed. As it points out, frontier models such as Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude train and serve on TPUs, but the rise of agentic AI workflows and inference requires greater coordination between compute and accelerated machine learning, creating opportunities for custom silicon such as Ironwood.
Indeed, Anthropic has already committed to accessing up to 1 million TPUs. James Bradbury, the firm’s head of compute, said in the blog post: “As demand [for Claude] continues to grow exponentially, we’re increasing our compute resources as we push the boundaries of AI research and product development. Ironwood’s improvements in both inference performance and training scalability will help us scale efficiently while maintaining the speed and reliability our customers expect.”
No financials have been confirmed for the deal, but it is likely to stretch to billions of dollars.
In tandem with Ironwood, Google is debuting improved options for its Axion family of Arm-based CPUs for general purpose workloads, plus it announced that C4A metal, its first Arm-based bare metal instance, will be coming soon in preview.
As might be expected, insatiable demand for AI infrastructure is having a significant effect on the finances at Google and parent company Alphabet, with the latter reporting that Q3 was its first ever quarter where it reached $100 billion in revenue.
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet and Google CEO, told investors during an earnings call: “I would say we are seeing substantial demand for our AI infrastructure products, including TPU-based and GPU-based solutions. It is one of the key drivers of our growth over the past year, and I think on a going-forward basis, I think we continue to see very strong demand, and we are investing to meet that.”
