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Google unveils Ironwood, seventh generation TPU, competing with Nvidia
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google is making its most powerful chip yet widely available, the search giant’s latest effort to try and win business from artificial intelligence companies by offering custom silicon.
The company said on Thursday that the seventh generation of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), called Ironwood, will hit the market for public use in the coming weeks, after it was initially introduced in April for testing and deployment.
The chip, built in-house, is designed to handle everything from the training of large models to powering real-time chatbots and AI agents. In connecting up to 9,216 chips in a single pod, Google says the new Ironwood TPUs eliminate “data bottlenecks for the most demanding models” and give customers “the ability to run and scale the largest, most data-intensive models in existence.”
Google is in the midst of an ultra high-stakes race, alongside rivals Microsoft, Amazon and Meta, to build out the AI infrastructure of the future. While the majority of large language models and AI workloads have relied on Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), Google’s TPUs fall into the category of custom silicon, which can offer advantages on price, performance and efficiency.
TPUs have been in the works for a decade. Ironwood, according to Google, is more than four times faster than its predecessor, and major customers are already lining up. AI startup Anthropic plans to use up to 1 million of the new TPUs to run its Claude model, Google said.
Alongside the new chip, Google is rolling out a suite of upgrades meant to make its cloud cheaper, faster, and more flexible, as it vies with larger cloud players Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
In its earnings report last week, Google reported third-quarter cloud revenue of $15.15 billion, a 34% increase from the same period a year earlier. Azure revenue jumped 40%, while Amazon reported 20% growth for AWS. Google said it’s signed more billion-dollar cloud deals in the first nine months of 2025 than in the previous two years combined.
To meet soaring demand, Google upped the high end of its forecast for capital spending this year to $93 billion from $85 billion.
“We are seeing substantial demand for our AI infrastructure products, including TPU-based and GPU-based solutions,” CEO Sundar Pichai said on the earnings call. “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.”
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