Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai during the Bloomberg Tech Conference on Wednesday, June 4, 2025 in San Francisco, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
google is making its most powerful chips widely available, and is the search giant’s latest effort to win business from artificial intelligence companies by offering custom silicon.
The company announced Thursday that its seventh-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), called Ironwood, will be first introduced in April for testing and deployment, and will be available to the public in the coming weeks.
Built in-house, the chip is designed to handle everything from training large models to powering real-time chatbots and AI agents. Google says the new Ironwood TPUs eliminate “data bottlenecks for the most demanding models” by connecting up to 9,216 chips in a single pod, giving customers “the ability to run and scale their largest and most data-intensive models in existence.”
Google is in the midst of a high-stakes competition with its rivals. microsoft, Amazon and metato build the AI infrastructure of the future. The majority of large-scale language models and AI workloads are Nvidia’s Google’s TPU, a graphics processing unit (GPU), falls into the custom silicon category and offers advantages in price, performance, and efficiency.
TPU has been researched for 10 years. Google says Ironwood is more than four times faster than previous versions, and major customers are already lining up. Google says AI startup Anthropic plans to use up to 1 million new TPUs to run its cloud models.
In addition to the new chips, Google is rolling out a series of upgrades aimed at making its cloud cheaper, faster and more flexible as it competes with cloud players Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
In its earnings call last week, Google reported third-quarter cloud revenue of $15.15 billion, an increase of 34% year over year. Azure revenue increased 40%, and Amazon reported a 20% increase in AWS revenue. Google announced it closed more $1 billion in cloud deals in the first nine months of 2025 than in the previous two years combined.
To accommodate the surge in demand, Google has raised the cap on its capital spending forecast for this year from $85 billion to $93 billion.
“We see strong demand for our AI infrastructure products, including TPU-based and GPU-based solutions,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an earnings call. “This has been one of the key drivers of our growth over the past year, and we believe demand will continue to be very strong going forward, and we are investing to meet it.”
Spotlight: Google and Anthropic ink cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars
