Azernews.Az

by Alimat Aliyeva

Google has begun the widespread rollout of its newest and most powerful AI chip, Ironwood, marking the seventh generation of its tensor processing units (TPUs). This move is part of the company’s strategy to strengthen its position in the artificial intelligence market by offering its own semiconductor solutions that can compete with Nvidia GPUs, Azernews reports.

First introduced for testing in April, Ironwood will be publicly available in the coming weeks. Designed entirely in-house, the chip can handle a full range of tasks — from training large language models to powering real-time chatbots and AI agents.

A standout feature of Ironwood is the ability to combine up to 9,216 chips into a single cluster, effectively eliminating “data bottlenecks” for the most demanding models. According to Google, the new TPU delivers four times the performance of its predecessor, opening the door to next-generation AI systems — from autonomous assistants to multimodal models capable of understanding text, audio, and video simultaneously.

Key clients are already showing interest. Anthropic, for instance, plans to deploy up to one million Ironwood TPUs to train and operate its Claude model.

Alongside the new chip, Google has rolled out updates to its cloud platform, making it faster, cheaper, and more flexible than competitors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google is positioning its cloud as the ultimate “AI ecosystem of the future,” enabling developers to scale their models without infrastructure limitations.

The surge in demand for AI infrastructure is already reflected in financial performance: Google Cloud’s revenue grew 34% year-over-year in the third quarter.

Industry experts suggest that Ironwood could be a turning point for AI hardware. For the first time, TPU architecture is approaching the capabilities of top-tier Nvidia GPUs, while offering better price-performance and energy efficiency. If the trend continues, 2025 could mark the beginning of a new era — a “chip race for intelligence.”