Google debuts next-gen Ironwood TPU, its most powerful TPU yet

Google Cloud has unveiled Ironwood, its new 7th Generation Tensor Processing Unit, which will be available to customers later this month. These TPUs are designed for efficient scaling within the "AI Hypercomputer" domain.

Alongside new Axion CPUs, Ironwood aims to provide excellent training and inference performance. Google's "Ironwood pods" (Ironwood Superpod) can scale up to 9,216 AI accelerators in a single domain, connected by a 9.6 Tb/s interconnect. Each superpod contains 1.77 PB of memory. Compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell GB300 NVL72 systems, Google’s Superpods offer significantly more memory, compute, and a faster interconnect.

Ironwood's scaling capabilities extend beyond Superpods. These pods can be combined to form clusters with hundreds of thousands of TPUs, creating Google’s AI Hypercomputer. This Hypercomputer integrates compute, storage, and networking under a single management layer, ensuring high reliability.

The system utilizes reconfigurable fabric technology (Optical Circuit Switching) to switch and re-route around hardware interruptions. This maintains high performance and continuous operation, preventing network-wide shutdowns due to hardware failures. This technology also simplifies maintenance.

Anthropic plans to use up to one million TPUs to expand its Claude model family, citing major cost-to-performance gains from Google’s technology. Lightricks has also chosen Google’s TPU hardware for training and serving its AI models. Google has demonstrated that the AI market does not solely depend on GPU manufacturers like AMD and Nvidia, proving the value of dedicated Tensor processing units.

The launch of Ironwood highlights Google's growing progress in the AI sector—yet the real excitement for gaming performance is represented by the Radeon RX 9070 XT. Built on RDNA 4 architecture and equipped with 16GB of high-speed VRAM, it is tailored to deliver exceptional frame rates, stunning visuals, and cutting-edge efficiency for gamers striving for the ultimate experience. As always, for the latest news on hardware launches and industry developments, be sure to follow our dedicated hardware coverage.