Google takes on NVIDIA with new Ironwood AI chip
What's the story
Google has unveiled its most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip to date, the Ironwood Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). The seventh-generation TPU is designed to handle the most demanding AI workloads and compete directly with NVIDIA's industry-leading GPUs. The new chip will be available for public use in the coming weeks after an initial testing phase earlier this year.
Technological advancement
Ironwood TPU is entirely in-house product
The Ironwood TPU is an entirely in-house product from Google. It can handle both the training of large models and the operation of real-time AI tools like chatbots and agents. The new architecture connects up to 9,216 chips in a single pod, eliminating data bottlenecks and enabling customers to run massive, data-intensive AI models.
Performance boost
Ironwood TPU offers over 4 times the performance of predecessor
Google claims that the Ironwood TPU offers over four times the performance of its predecessor, marking a significant improvement in speed and energy efficiency. The launch comes as Google doubles down on its cloud computing division, hoping to become a leading AI infrastructure provider. Along with the Ironwood rollout, Google is also introducing upgrades to make its cloud services faster, cheaper, and more flexible.
Market adoption
Anthropic to be first major client for new chips
AI start-up Anthropic, a key partner of Google, is one of the first major clients for the new Ironwood chips. Anthropic plans to use up to one million Ironwood TPUs to run its Claude AI model. This indicates a strong demand for the new hardware among top AI developers.
Financial outlook
Google Cloud's Q3 performance and future outlook
Google Cloud has been witnessing strong growth, with the company reporting $15.15 billion in revenue in Q3 2025, a 34% year-on-year increase. To meet the rising AI demand, Google has raised its capital expenditure forecast for 2025 from $85 billion to $93 billion. "We are seeing substantial demand for our AI infrastructure products," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during a recent earnings call.