Overview
- Ironwood, Google’s seventh‑generation TPU, will be generally available in the coming weeks after limited deployments that began in April.
- Google cites up to 10× the performance of TPU v5p and roughly 4× over TPU v6/Trillium, targeting both large‑scale training and real‑time serving.
- Pods scale to 9,216 chips with a 9.6 Tb/s inter‑chip network and about 1.77 PB of shared high‑bandwidth memory, supported by optical circuit switching and liquid cooling.
- Anthropic plans to access up to one million Ironwood TPUs to train and serve Claude, with early adopters also highlighted for emerging multimodal and agentic workloads.
- Alongside Ironwood, Google is rolling out Arm‑based Axion CPUs with new instances (C4A generally available, N4A in preview, C4A metal in preview), as independent analysis suggests per‑chip metrics that approach Nvidia’s latest Blackwell parts and as Alphabet lifts capex guidance to $93 billion to expand AI infrastructure.