Google launches Ironwood, its first TPU to run its thinking AI models

At Google Cloud Next 25, Google Cloud has announced Ironwood, its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), designed to be the company’s most powerful, scalable and energy-efficient custom AI accelerator to date. Notably, Ironwood is the first TPU specifically optimised for inference – the process where a trained model uses its learned knowledge to make predictions or draw conclusions from new, unseen data.

Google says that Ironwood represents an evolution, built to meet the evolving needs of generative AI and the increasing importance of inference in AI applications.