Google introduced the seventh generation of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), Ironwood, last week. Unveiled at Google Cloud Next 25, it is said to be the company’s most powerful and scalable custom artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator. The Mountain View-based tech giant said the chipset was specifically designed for AI inference — the compute used by an AI model to process a query and generate a response. The company will soon make its Ironwood TPUs available to developers via the Google Cloud platform.
Google Introduces Ironwood TPU for AI Inference
In a blog post, the tech giant introduced its seventh-generation AI accelerator chipset. Google stated that Ironwood TPUs will enable the company to move from a response-based AI system to a proactive AI system, which is focused on dense large language models (LLMs), mixture-of-expert (MoE) models, and agentic AI systems that “retrieve and generate data to collaboratively deliver insights and answers.”
Notably, TPUs are custom-built chipsets aimed at AI and machine learning (ML) workflows. These accelerators offer extremely high parallel processing, especially for deep learning-related tasks, as well as significantly high power efficiency.
Google said each Ironwood chip comes with peak compute of 4,614 teraflop (TFLOP), which is a considerably higher throughput compared to its predecessor Trillium, which was unveiled in May 2024. The tech giant also plans to make these chipsets available as clusters to maximise the processing power for higher-end AI workflows.
Ironwood can be scaled up to a cluster of 9,216 liquid-cooled chips linked with an Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) network. The chipset is also one of the new components of Google Cloud AI Hypercomputer architecture. Developers on Google Cloud can access Ironwood in two sizes — a 256 chip configuration and a 9,216 chip configuration.
At its most expansive cluster, Ironwood chipsets can generate up to 42.5 Exaflops of computing power. Google claimed that its throughput is more than 24X of the compute generated by the world’s largest supercomputer El Capitan, which offers 1.7 Exaflops per pod. Ironwood TPUs also come with expanded memory, with each chipset offering 192GB, sextuple of what Trillium was equipped with. The memory bandwidth has also been increased to 7.2Tbps.
Notably, Ironwood is currently not available to Google Cloud developers. Just like the previous chipset, the tech giant will likely first transition its internal systems to the new TPUs, including the company’s Gemini models, before expanding its access to developers.
